


Matters of Policy

by TomatoNadeshiko



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Lightsbridge University, Other, spoilers through Circle Reforged #1 #2 and #3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-23 11:17:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 41
Words: 67,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9654083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomatoNadeshiko/pseuds/TomatoNadeshiko
Summary: If she were being honest, Ana Cheeseman would admit that her name was actually Trisana Chandler and that she'd been awarded her mage's medallion at the age of fourteen.  But Tris had learned that complete honesty wasn't always the best policy.  No, sometimes honesty was the worst policy.





	1. Chapter 1

For someone who relished her privacy as obviously as she did, Ana Cheeseman had a surprising number of visitors to her cramped dormitory room. And she almost always let them in.

"Ana, I'm having problems with the homework set on key elements in Sympathetic Magic…" 

The plump, long-nosed young woman would sigh, place a marker in her book and set it aside.  "Which part?" 

She was just another first-year student, but for some reason, Ana Cheeseman seemed to know how to tackle all sorts of magical problems, and was able to break down the steps clearly so that the answers became obvious.  Once her classmates had started coming to her for homework help, it seemed natural to ask her advice on related subjects.

"My charms lecturer insists that brewing potions for a living requires too much investment in raw materials that can spoil, but how can you make a good living making charms?  Most of the work she talks about doing with charms is renewing them, which takes a lot of energy and is boring.  I like the complexity of potion making."

The plump woman pushed her spectacles up her long nose more firmly.  "Well, there are complex charm designs that maybe you wouldn't find so dull, but I agree.  Potion brewing is generally a more dynamic enterprise.  if you're going to brew potions independently, it requires a fairly expensive set up, but the return on investment rapidly scales.  Here are the calculations I did on it…"  Ana lifted a large black ledger book from a shelf near her tiny knee-desk and flipped through pages, pointing out columns of numbers written in an impeccably neat hand.  "However, if you really like complicated potions, setting up as an independent brewer might not be the best course.  Most of the really interesting magic is done in teams.  Dedicate Crane of Winding Circle, for example, leads a group that works on finding antidotes to rare poisons and cures for unusual diseases.  I'm sure there are people doing similar work here at Lightsbridge.  Why don't you try auditing some of their lectures and see what they specialize in here…?"

And once people started taking her advice on magical subjects, it was an easy next step to ask her for more active help with their problems.

"I can't miss this opportunity!  How often do we get to hear someone like him speak?  Don't you want to go?  Please, help me find a way to get into the lecture hall, that's all I ask."  Lisse was a small, cheerful girl with a voice that could shatter glass.  She was kneeling theatrically in supplication, her fists gripping the hem of Ana's skirts.  "I will owe you!  I'll even wash your laundry for a month!"  Tight brown curls bobbed around Lisse' ears as she begged.

Ana Cheeseman lifted her pale eyebrows and looked down at her classmate over the top of the book she was reading.  "That won't be necessary," she insisted, not quite disguising a mix of horror and distaste at the thought of someone else touching her laundry.  "If it means that much to you, I think I can find a way."  She brushed off further gratitude.  "Just meet me here an hour after midday.  I want to finish reading this first."  She turned a page, and the other girl scrambled out gleefully, making happy noises all the way down the hall back to her own room. 

If she were honest, Ana Cheeseman would have to admit she rather enjoyed these interruptions.  Once the other residents of her dorm realized she was genuinely willing to help, despite the eye rolling and heavy sighs she occasionally heaved when asked, the girls had started bringing her more and more interesting problems.  But, if Ana Cheeseman were being honest, she'd be using her real name while at Lightsbridge University, and she wouldn't be bound by the rules pertaining to student magicians.  If she were being honest, Ana Cheeseman would admit that her name was actually Trisana Chandler had that she'd been awarded her mage's medallion at the age of fourteen.  But Tris had learned that complete honesty wasn't always the best policy, particularly given that one of her peculiar gifts was the near-legendary ability to see visions and hear speech on the winds.  She frequently found herself in possession of more sensitive information than she knew what to do with.  No, sometimes honesty was the worst policy.

Tris opened the shutters of the window over her bed.  Late morning sun angled away from the room to splash on the building opposite in a long, diagonal streak.  Removing her spectacles, she knelt on the bed, framed in the open window, passively watching and listening for the breezes that might bring her the information she wanted.  She could entice a breeze close and send it out on a directed mission, but students weren't supposed to work magic without a senior magician advising, and Ana had to act like a student.  Besides, it was more fun this way.  And since it wasn't a matter of life and death, no matter how her classmate had acted, Tris could afford to challenge herself a little.

Tris liked intellectual challenges.  Getting her friend into the right lecture hall to hear a popular guest speaker was a nice puzzle.  When particularly powerful or famous mages came to speak, it was often at the behest of a particular professor on behalf of a particular class.  If you were not enrolled in the class, you were not supposed to be allowed in the room.  And yet, somehow, popular lectures frequently managed to fill their rooms with many times the number of genuinely enrolled students.

Fifteen minutes later, Tris had the bones of a working plan.  She closed the shutters, settled her spectacles once more on the bridge of her long nose and resumed reading.  She wanted to get to the end of current chapter before it was time for the students' midday meal. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "This isn't the way to the lecture…" Lisse said, but when Ana didn't even pause, second guessed herself, "…is it?"

Lisse skidded to a halt in front of Ana's dorm room.Before she could knock, Ana opened the door, handing a bundle to the girl standing in the hallway."Put this on."Ana herself wore a stained and sturdy work apron over her sober student dress, a pair of heavy leather gloves tucked into the waistband.Lisse found her bundle to be a another well-used apron.When both women were similarly attired, Ana led them down the stairs and around the back of the dormitory, threading between buildings with determination. 

"This isn't the way to the lecture…" Lisse said, but when Ana didn't even pause, second guessed herself, "…is it?" 

When the walkway met another, Ana held a hand up, and now the pair paused for a moment.  When Lisse would have repeated her question, Ana shushed her.  Lisse held her breath.  Suddenly, Ana shifted to the left, and followed the curve of the path around behind a building to a plain wooden door set in an unremarkable facade.  When she tried the handle, she found it unlocked.  The door opened with a whoosh of musty-smelling air drawn through the long central hallway of the big building. 

"Oh, good.  That saves time," Ana commented, relaxing visibly. 

"What saves time?  There are no lecture rooms anywhere near here," Lisse insisted.

Ana pulled Lisse through the doorway.  "Come on."  Racing along the corridor, Ana turned suddenly to her left and vanished down a set of curving stairs. 

Lisse followed more cautiously.  The basement level was dimly lit, but for a bright rectangle of light from an open door.  She watched as Ana knocked on the open doorframe confidently.    

"Professor Nepeta?  We've come to help you carry your specimen trays."

A voice from inside the basement room said something incoherent to Lisse as she came to join Ana.  The front half looked like the office of many professors Lisse knew: a desk piled high with books, shelves crammed to overflowing with books and tools, a few odd pieces of equipment stuffed in corners, with papers and more books piled on top of them.  Though in a basement, the office was filled with what appeared to be natural light.  Entering the room, Lisse saw why. 

The room was long, longer than the rooms above it.  Part of the ceiling farthest from the door had been replaced with panes of wavy glass fitted together into one massive sky-facing window, admitting a green-tinged light from above.  Directly underneath those panes were tables and shelves hosting a multitude of tiny green plants, each in their own little pots, many no bigger than a thimble, but a few as big as a cupped hand.  The afternoon sunlight filled the room with its brilliance.

"Don't worry about that, Professor.  We know what to do."  Ana snagged Lisse's elbow. 

"We do?" Lisse squeaked in protest as she found herself propelled forward.

"Gloves should be in the pocket of your apron.  I'll give you a tray and you just have to hold it steady while Professor Nepeta puts specimens on it.  If it gets too heavy for you to carry, say so." 

Quickly, Lisse found the gloves in her pocket and tugged them on while Ana located the empty trays, sturdy wooden things with short sides and cut out handles.  Lisse took one and saw that the inside of her tray was criss-crossed with twine in a tight grid pattern.  She wondered what that was for.  Ana nudged the shorter girl into position.

"I don't like to take them out, you know.  Not unless it's very still, and there's a bit of a breeze today, yes.  The little darlings get so cold, and there's a fine line between too cold and too hot, so you have to be careful about overheating them, too.  Not to mention the other hazards..." 

The professor wore an apron much like the ones Ana and Lisse had on, but much dirtier and with the bottom edge all frayed.  His gloves were well worn and mud-colored.  He was tall.  He stooped under the glass ceiling, though he didn't need to.  The glassed over back portion of the room was more spacious than the front.  Peering closely at the array of greenery before him, his grip was sure and careful as he tucked tiny plant pots between strands of twine on the tray so that they would be held closely in place without shifting or rattling against the other pots.   

"But what sort of an opportunity is this?  I wasn't asked so much as invited.  Yes.  Most generously invited.  I couldn't say no to showing off my precious darlings in this exalted company, now, could I?"  Professor Nepeta cooed to his plants with sweet gentle love words, then startled Lisse by announcing briskly in a harsh voice.  "That's enough.  Move.  Next tray."   

Lisse, stumbled back.  Ana's hand between her shoulder blades steadied her and a sideways inclination of her head indicated that Lisse should go stand by the door with her burden.  Evidently realizing he'd caused her violent reaction somehow, Professor Nepeta mumbled something that might have been an apology, or might have been a curse.  Lisse watched as Ana took her place fearlessly, holding a second tray out for more specimens.  The plump girl responded to the professor's noises with sympathetic sounds of her own like "ah"  "uh-huh" and "mmm." 

At last, the Professor Nepeta sighed.  "I can't take them all, I suppose.  That will have to do."  He removed one glove to scratch his head, disheveling his dark, curling hair with long, articulate fingers. After staring for several moments at the shelf of plants he had just abandoned, he appeared to change his mind.  "Oh, okay.  Maybe this one, too."  He pulled his glove on again before removing one final thumb-sized pot from the shelf.  He paused, studying the tray Ana held.  Obligingly, Ana lifted the tray into a better position.  After brief deliberation, the mage tucked the tiny plant between two larger ones, making sure none of their containers were close enough to rattle against each other, and nodded.  Ana lowered the tray again to a comfortable carrying height. 

"Professor, if you take my friend's tray, she can open and close doors for us," Ana suggested mildly.

The plant mage blinked, as if seeing Ana for the first time.  "Huh."  He blinked again.  "Oh.  Yes.  That would… yes, I would be much more comfortable."  He followed Ana, stopping at the doorway to relieve Lisse of her burden.  Lisse waited just outside until both trays had been navigated through the barely-wide enough passageway.  Then she closed the door for them. 

Professor Nepeta led the way, muttering in phrases half caution and half concern, with Ana following, and Lisse darting ahead to open doors for the small procession.  They threaded their path through several buildings, the plant mage insisting his "darlings" avoid the open air whenever possible.  At last the three passed through one of the side doors leading into the largest lecture theatre Lightsbridge University boasted.

The small lecture stage was already crowded when they arrived.  Ana and Lisse paused at the small stairs leading up to the speaking platform, but Professor Nepeta did not, pushing his way toward the long table where several robed figures already sat.  He placed his tray carefully on the table, then turned to gesture to Ana, that she should bring the second tray up. 

The lecturer whose class this was, in the dark robes of her calling, bustled up to Professor Nepeta, but stopped short, well clear of his specimen tray.  Her tone was scolding.  "But Nepeta, you said you weren't coming!  Well, never mind.  You can have my chair for now."  She turned to see Ana approaching with the second tray of plants and scrambled out of the way.  "Goodness!  Two trays of herbs!  You astound me!"

Depositing the second specimen tray on the table for the professor to fuss over, Ana turned to the lecturer and offered, "I can fetch another chair if you tell me where they're kept."

"Oh, dear.  Yes, I supposed we'll need to.  I know we have a few chairs in the anteroom."  The lecturer gripped Ana's arm, using the girl as a shield between herself and Professor Nepeta and his plants as they walked past him.  Leading Ana down the stairs to the correct door.  Lisse heard the older woman instruct in a falsely cheerful voice, "and get chairs for yourself and your friend.  No running off now, mind?  Then you make sure Nepeta and his "darlings" get back to their cave where they belong afterwards.  And with luck I won't have to deal with him again until next summer," she finished through gritted teeth, then turned Ana loose. 

Shrugging, Ana pushed the door open and gestured for Lisse to follow her. 

"That's it?  We get chairs and we get to stay?"

"It looks that way," Ana agreed. 

Lisse yelped and jumped, then wrapped her dorm-sister in a big, squeezing hug.  "You are a SAINT!  You work MIRACLES!"

Ana winced.  "We still have to carry Professor Nepeta's trays back to his office after the lecture."

"I don't CARE!" Lisse crowed gleefully, dancing in a little circle.  "I get to see Briar Moss speak in person!  Hah!"

Ana frowned.  "Wait.  What?"

"Come on!  Let's get chairs!  i don't want to miss any of this!"


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The day's topic was the miniaturization of plants.

Tris pushed her companion to take the extra chair up to the table where the panel of lecturers had gathered.Aside from Professor Nepeta and the dark robed woman leading this lecture, two other plant mages sat, comparing notes while idly observing the chairs fill with students and other mages.One wore the yellow and black robes of an Air Dedicate of the Living Circle order.The other was dressed in a full sleeved linen shirt and soft leather breeches.Tris knew them both, and hoped for the moment to avoid them.

Dragging two chairs for herself and Lisse to the far back corner of the room where she might lurk unnoticed, Tris realized it had been a futile gesture.

 _I know you're in here somewhere, Coppercurls_ , a familiar voice came through the magical connection she shared with Briar.  _I wasn't sure you'd show up so quickly, but I should have known your long nose would sniff us out the day we arrived._

Tris' head came up quickly.  _I didn't even know you were in Karang.  And I had no idea you were interested in lecturing._ She squinted at the young mage sitting on the stage at the other end of the enormous space.  For a moment, her spectacles reflected the sunlight streaming in through the high, open windows in the room and caused her vision to blur.  She blinked hard and her vision cleared.  He wasn't looking in her direction at all.  _Don't let Crane know I'm here yet,_ she told him. _I didn't tell him.  He doesn't know I'm not..._

 _Not yourself?_ Briar quipped, amusement coloring the connection between them.  _Rosethorn warned him you were here under an assumed identity, but he doesn't have details.  I was going to let you deal with that._

Warily, Tris sat back, hoping Dedicate Crane, at least, would be unable to recognize her at this distance.  She wasn't quite ready to explain things to the older mage.  She wasn't sure she could, entirely. 

Lisse crept into the seat next to her, vibrating gently with suppressed excitement.  "Thank you!" she whispered. 

The day's topic was the miniaturization of plants.  The Lecturer introduced herself with a wink and a veiled comment about the new faces in the audience, as Dita Batnose.  She was obviously basking in her triumph at having secured such popular guest speakers.  Tris saw more than a few mages, shiny medallions proud upon their chests, standing in the back of the audience.  Lecturer Batnose introduced her three guest speakers, then asked Dedicate Crane to begin with an overview of the subject for her students.

Tris wasn't a plant mage, but she usually enjoyed listening to Dedicate Crane speak.  He had such a logical, tidy mind.  Though he could get rather dry and pedantic, Tris enjoyed his thorough attention to detail.  Lisse apparently did not agree, however.  She kept fidgeting and shifting in her seat. 

At last, Crane called on his colleague.  "Now Briar Moss will explain the basic principles that apply when shaping shakkans, using the shakkan he stole from my greenhouse as an example."

Briar laughed and clapped the older man on the shoulder.  "I didn't steal him, I rescued him."

"Shakkans are patient.  I would have figured out his problem eventually." 

"Shakkans may be patient, but he *was* dying.  I had to act fast."  Lifting the wide, shallow container the miniature tree was rooted in, Briar brought it forward and set it on the edge of the stage.  "I did apologize to you for that, didn't I?"

Dedicate Crane took a moment to explain, "Briar and I are both ambient mages.  Though all mages must study and experiment to hone their craft, because the power of ambient mages comes from outside themselves, they may occasionally be compelled by impulses they cannot quite explain.  When examined further, these flashes of insight usually prove quite correct.  That is how Briar was certain the shakkan was dying.  Briar was just a student at the time, but the plant's need reached out to him through their magical affinity."

"Of course, as Dedicate Crane has taught me, flashes of insight are no substitute for precision and care," Briar added.  "Even if you are blessed with knowledge that others do not possess, you still have to do the work to support it."  He stood and dusted his hands on the side of his breeches.  "Furthermore, it takes a strong and wise mage to be able to admit to his errors, as Dedicate Crane did in the matter of the shakkan.  As you learn, occasionally you will find it necessary to prune away old assumptions in order to let new understanding blossom."  Both mages nodded in agreement, evidently quite in harmony.  Tris suppressed a slight smile, seeing them so amiable together.  What a difference a few years had made in their relationship!

But now, beside Tris, Lisse was all attention, nose quivering.  "Did you hear that?  He's an ambient mage!" she whispered, as if it meant something hugely significant.  Tris couldn't imagine what was so great about being an ambient mage that Lisse would say it so rapturously. 

There was little Briar could say about shakkans for a general audience that Tris hadn't heard already at the dinner table with their foster sisters or from eavesdropping on her more gregarious friend at boring parties.  She let her attention drift.  Professor Nepeta looked nervous enough to have a litter of kittens.  He kept reaching towards the little plants in his trays, then pulling his hands back, at one point sitting on his hands to keep them from twitching forward.  When his hands were secured, the plant mage kept darting furtive glances at Lecturer Batnose, then away again.  Tris wondered what kind of speaker he would be, and was afraid she already knew the answer. 

Her worst fears were confirmed when Briar wound up his presentation and the class' lecturer, reluctantly it seemed, invited Professor Nepeta to speak.  Trying to follow the thread of the gawky plant mage's babble, Tris thought his ideas sounded promising, involving careful monitoring of light levels, moisture and temperature, to increase the potency of herbs for certain applications.  Unfortunately, he was a terrible speaker.  His hands flailed in awkward, repetitive gestures, he couldn't quite decide where to focus, he rushed his words, then stopped in the middle of thoughts to take deep, gasping breaths, because he tried to speak without stopping.  But perhaps worst of all, his speech was pitched just a bit too softly for the room.  Tris could hear him with some effort, as the warm weather ensured that windows were open and breezes were circulating freely, but she might have been the only person who could.  Students shifted restlessly on their chairs. 

Perhaps it didn't matter if people couldn't hear him anyway, but Lecturer Batnose finally cut him off during one of his pauses to breathe.  "Thank you, Professor Nepeta.  You always bring the most interesting work to us."  A sprinkle of quiet chuckles from the audience greeted this backhanded encomium.  "And now, I'd like to open the floor to questions."

Briar nudged Tris again through their connection. _Can you stick around after?_

Tris could sense some deeper unease that belied his casual words.  _No.  I have a job I need to finish._

_Crane and I are staying with contacts of his.  Come find us this evening?_

Sending reassurance to Briar that she would seek him out later, Tris turned her attention to Lisse.  She feared it would take a minor miracle to get Lisse, Professor Nepeta and his two trays of plant specimens out of the room without attracting unwanted attention, particularly as Lisse seemed to be in a blissful trance focused on Mage Briar Moss.    

The class finally ended with a great shuffling of feet and squeaking of chair legs as the students rose, some heading for the exit, some fighting the prevailing stream of bodies to reach the front of the hall.  Tris led Lisse in a wide arc around the scrum in the center of the room, avoiding most of the congestion.  No matter which direction she faced, Lisse's nose pointed toward Briar at all times. 

"He's even better looking than I was told.  And he's so very confident!  I wonder how far up his arms those tattoos go…?" 

Tris stopped in the narrow gap between chairs in a long row and turned to confront Lisse.  The smaller girl was forced to stop.  "Don't tell me that you wanted to come to this lecture because you have a… a crush?"

"It's not a crush.  It's fate."  Lisse's eyes were dreamy, with a glint of something Tris knew all too well.  "Don't you agree he looks just… too perfectly… delicious?"

Since Briar had returned from his travels more a man than a boy, Tris had heard variations of this sentiment from many women, and more than a few men.  Her stock answer was that of course she knew what he looked like, he was her brother.  That Briar Moss was like a brother to Trisana Chandler was unexceptional, common knowledge around Summersea.  But Ana Cheeseman had no reason to even know who Briar Moss was.  To claim him as a brother would be no better than shouting her true identity to the world.

Tris eventually settled on a noncommittal, "I suppose…"

"Come on!  Hurry up or we'll miss him!"  Lisse took advantage of Tris' inattention to squeeze around her and dart through the crowd in hopes of catching the eye of her idol. 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nepeta didn't know why he bothered leaving his office, sometimes. Only his plants understood and responded to him. He'd never been very good at invisibility spells, but people seemed to ignore him anyway.

It was always the same.Nepeta didn't know why he bothered leaving his office, sometimes.Only his plants understood and responded to him.As students and mages joined the speakers around the table on the stage, Nepeta tried to pretend he was invisible.He'd never been very good at invisibility spells, but people seemed to ignore him anyway.He brushed a fingertip over a delicately wrinkled leaf of the miniature borage in the sample tray in front of him and inhaled.The clean cucumber-like scent calmed him.He gathered his strength.It was time to go.

Hoisting the tray in front of him, he looked around.  He couldn't see the two young people who had helped him carry the trays here.  Frowning, Nepeta put the tray back down on the table and squinted into the confusion of students and mages still milling about.

"Incredible.  And you say you achieved these results through selective environmental control?"

Nepeta startled.  The temple mage from Winding Circle, Dedicate Crane, stood next to him, hands clasped respectfully behind his back as he leaned over the tray Nepeta had momentarily neglected.

"The borage's scent is extraordinarily powerful.  And it is a true miniature, not pruned small like the shakkan."  Dedicate Crane inhaled appreciatively.  "Are all these herbs as potent as the borage?  I see… well, the dill is obvious.  Is that an agrimony specimen?  My word!"  The visiting mage leaned over to get a better look at the small, yet fully grown agrimony plant flowering in pot no bigger than a clenched fist. 

Nepeta flapped his hands.  "Be careful.  Please, be careful.  They are very fragile and when bruised… the effects…." 

Dedicate Crane straightened and favored Professor Nepeta with a curious look.  "How potent are these herbs?" 

"I have to be very careful," Nepeta whispered.  "My last assistant brushed against a stray honeysuckle tendril I was having difficulty training and left me soon after to, uh… pursue other career opportunities…"  He bit his lip.  "She's apparently been quite successful, too…"

Looking slightly startled, Dedicate Crane pursed his lips.  "Honeysuckle, you say?  Well, be that as it may, I'm sure there is work yet to be done.  How do you control their climate?  Do you have a greenhouse here on campus or…?"

The visiting mage was interrupted by the breathless arrival of the thoughtful student who had helped Nepeta carry the specimen trays to the hall.  "I'm sorry, Professor, but are you ready to go now?  I'm afraid we'll have to manage without…" she broke off suddenly, staring at Dedicate Crane, mouth agape. 

The Dedicate lifted his eyebrows.

The plump young woman closed her mouth with an audible snap. 

"I would be happy to offer my assistance, if a third set of hands would be useful," Dedicate Crane offered smoothly.  "I would love the chance to see your work space, if you'd be so very accommodating, Professor?"

Nepeta felt like he was missing something about this conversation, something maybe he should know, but couldn't figure out what.  He hated that feeling.  He hesitated.  "Well, it is much easier to manage two trays with three people, as one can get the doors and, well, the sun is setting and the afternoon is not as warm as it was.  I think…"  Making a decision, Nepeta nodded to the dedicate, pulling on his gloves.  "…yes, I think that will… after all… you know…" 

The dedicate smiled, then turned to the helpful student.  "Might I borrow your gloves…?"

"Cheeseman," the young woman blurted.  "My name is Ana Cheeseman."  She offered her work gloves to the Dedicate.  When he accepted them, she turned away suddenly and began the work of clearing a path for them, gently tapping shoulders and ushering bodies away from the specimen trays.  She held the door open for the two mages and their burdens, and closed it firmly in their wake.

The return journey was as eventless as their earlier passage had been, but Nepeta could not be comfortable until every one of his herbs was out of harm's way.  He jittered in the dark basement hallway, hardly able to wait while the helpful student… Miss Cheeseman… opened the door to his work room.  He nearly knocked her over in his rush to achieve the sanctuary of the glass ceilinged room.  Dedicate Crane followed him at a more decorous pace. 

Looking around for a place to put his loaded tray, Nepeta was stymied.  He stood under the fading glow of sunlight filtered through the wavy glass above him.  It was nearly sunset.  He felt a surge of panic.

With a noise that sounded to Nepeta ominously like a breeze that presaged a storm, Miss Cheeseman stepped forward.  "I'll hold that for you, Professor."  Taking the tray bare-handed from from Nepeta's grip she held it at a perfect working height.  Carefully to avoid accidents, but with as much speed as he dared, Nepeta transferred the plants from the tray to their accustomed locations on his shelves.  When he had replaced the first batch, Dedicate Crane took Miss Cheeseman's place to give him access to the second.  Only when both trays were empty and the young woman had returned them to wherever she'd found them, could Nepeta think of relaxing.

Dedicate Crane's attention was focused on the glass paneling above them.  "So the window sits at ground level?  How do you make glass that looks like this?" 

Nepeta cleared his throat.  "I'm not entirely sure.  It… uh… came with the room.  I'm not sure what it was intended for originally, but it seems to be very effective in intensifying sunlight without creating hot spots or burning the plants."

"What does your assistant think on the subject?" Dedicate Crane asked mildly.

"My… assistant…?" Nepeta asked with confusion.  "I don't have an assistant now, of course, not since the, er… accident…."

"Oh?"  Dedicate Crane frowned gently.  "Then this young woman...?"

Nepeta frowned.  "Oh.  No, she just came for today to help me carry my specimens to the lecture hall."

Dedicate Crane regarded her mildly.  "And Miss Ch…" the mage seemed to choke, "Cheeseman, was it?"  His lips compressed into a tight line.  "Miss Cheeseman, what is it, exactly, that you do at Lightsbridge University?"

Miss Cheeseman squared her shoulders at the visiting mage.  "I'm a first year student here." 

"A…" Dedicate Crane seemed to be having difficulty getting his words out.  "…first year…student?"  One bony hand came up to press against his mouth.

"Ah.  Yes, of course.  A student.  Thank you, Miss Cheeseman," Nepeta said at last.  "You were very helpful today." 

"You're welcome, Professor Nepeta.  Now, if you'll excuse me…"

Dedicate Crane called out abruptly, "Wait!"  He dug his hands into the pockets of his habit, looking for something.  "I'm sorry, Professor, but might I use your desk for a moment?  I need to write a note to my colleague.  Miss… Cheeseman, you seem a responsible young lady, for a…" he coughed gently, "…first year student."  An odd expression passed across his face.  "Could I prevail upon you to carry a message for me, before you go?"

"Yes, of course," Miss Cheeseman agreed with asperity and a seeming complete lack of deference to the visiting mage. 

After scrawling a hasty note with a charcoal pencil, Dedicate Crane folded the foolscap sheet neatly in on itself and wrote a direction on the outside.  "Can you find this address?" he asked, holding the note out to the young woman.

She glanced at the note. "Yes, of course."  The paper vanished into her pocket and the girl took her leave quickly. 

Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, Dedicate Crane returned his attention to Professor Nepeta and his work.  "Now, would you mind explaining more about the miniaturization again, Nepeta?  You were a little difficult to hear in the lecture hall, and I wasn't sure whether these plants' diminutive size was a side effect or the intended result of your work with them.  I am fascinated!"

Gratified by the attention, Nepeta started with an explanation of the genesis of his current project.  It was a relief to finally find someone to talk to who seemed to understand the implications of his research, and asked such interesting questions along the way! 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was a simple matter to follow the thread of magic that connected them, through the sheltered campus that Tris had spent the last several months exploring.

Tris did not need the address written on the note to find its intended recipient.  Her connection with Briar had been forged when they were children, and though their travels had taken them in different directions, their magical bond had been renewed recently and was stronger than ever.  It was a simple matter to follow the thread of magic that connected them, through the sheltered campus that Tris had spent the last several months exploring.  The sun had just set.  An orange glow still lit the sky when she stopped in front of a house in a less trafficked residential area.  Tris wasn't as familiar with this neighborhood, but knew that it was popular with researching mages and lecturers working at the University.  The houses were all in good repair, if a bit old fashioned in style. 

Tris sent the magical equivalent of a throat clearing noise through her bond with Briar.  _I'm outside.  Crane sent me with a note for you._

 _Well?  Knock on the door so someone can let you in, already!_   Briar answered tartly. 

Feeling like she had just been handed a script for one of the horrible holiday pageants so popular with charity schools, Tris smoothed her sweaty hands on the stained apron she still wore, suddenly nervous.  She knocked, clutching the note in her pocket. 

A maidservant opened the door.

"I have a note for the mage Briar Moss," Tris announced.  The maid held her hand out for the promised note.  Tris handed her the note.  The maid fished a small coin from her own spotless house apron and pressed it into Tris' hand.  The door closed.  Tris took a step back, not entirely sure what to do next. 

As she was deliberating, the door opened again, more forcefully this time.  Briar reached out, snagged Tris by the arm, and pulled her inside without ceremony.  The door closed with a slam, quivering on its hinges. 

"Stupid, ridiculous, inconvenient…" Briar muttered, letting go as Tris reached for her apron ties to take the stained garment off.  The maid accepted the bundled work garment and disappeared into a side room."

"I'm not sure that was the right thing to do," Tris lifted one pale eyebrow at Briar.  "The maid might think I'm one of your girlfriends now."

Briar frowned.  "Of course she won't.  Everybody knows you're my ssss…" his breath trailed off with a sustained hiss.  After a moment he swore.

The maid returned.  "Will there be anything else?"

Briar looked at Tris.  "Are you hungry?"

"Starving," Tris admitted.  "I missed midday."  At Briar's questioning look she supplied somewhat sheepishly, "I had a interesting book."

Briar nodded.  "Our hosts are off at something they're calling a committee meeting, but I am reliably informed that it's an excuse to tap a keg of cider.  They told us not to expect them back until late.  I haven't eaten yet either."  He turned to the maid.  "Could you bring us some food and…" he glanced at Tris.  "…tea?"  At Tris' nod, he confirmed with the maid, "food and tea."

"Shall I bring a tray to the book room?" the maid offered.

"My room is…" Briar started to say, when Tris overrode him.

"The book room sounds perfect."

The maid nodded to Tris in a manner that was not quite respectful, then made a gracious curtsey to Briar before taking her leave. 

"But their library is so stuffy," Briar complained.  "At least my room has a nice window and some friendly vines trained up the trellis on the wall outside."

Tris allowed him to close the hall door between them and the maid before explaining softly.  "Briar.  I'm not your sister.  Not here at Lightsbridge." 

Briar stuck his chin out, looking as mulish as their foster sister Sandry when she disagreed with someone.  "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that if you pay attention to me, people will notice that attention.  I am not pretty or well connected or any of the things that might easily explain your attention, so they will ask: why is Briar Moss being so… nice to this random first year student? And if you invite me up to your room...?"  She waited.

"Why did you have to make this so difficult?" Briar grumbled.

"It's not difficult for me," Tris told him mildly, "Coming here incognito has made things a whole lot simpler.  And I'm enjoying myself.  I don't want to jeopardize that."  She let Briar think about that for a moment.  Changing the subject abruptly, "Speaking of books, have you seen the main University library yet?"

"Not yet.  We just arrived this morning, actually."  Briar let himself be distracted.  As Tris extolled the manifold virtues of the Lightsbridge library, Briar opened the door to the house's small book room and ushered her inside. 

"So what are you and Crane doing here?" Tris asked curiously. 

"Lecturing, naturally," Briar answered flippantly. 

Tris glared at Briar.  "No, seriously.  If you're here to check up on me…"

Briar laughed, "Not everything is about you, Coppercurls!"  But there was a brittle undertone to his voice. 

"All right.  Tell me.  What's going on?  What brings you to Lightsbridge?"  Tris took his hand and held it comfortingly, noticing the elaborate tattoos that writhed and disappeared up his sleeve cuffs featured wilting flowers and drooping leaves.  "Are things okay at home?  Are you okay?"

Briar shook his head.  "It's not me."

"Rosethorn," Tris jumped to the only logical conclusion she could make.  "Something's happened to Rosethorn.  That's why you and Crane are both here!  What's wrong with Rosethorn?"

"I can't hide anything from you, can I?" Briar squeezed her hand and let go.  "She's having strange… interludes.  Crane is afraid she might be showing new symptoms of something wrong with her brain, like what happened when we saved her life.  He wants to get the opinion of some of the mages here who specialize in the sort of healing she might need."

"And you think you can help?"

Briar ran both hands through his short, dark hair.  "I don't know.  But I have to try."

"Yes.  Of course you do."  Tris spoke with plain sympathy.  "Niko always said that the bond between teacher and student is the strongest connection mages have."

"Huh," Briar looked at Tris curiously.  "Niko said that?"

Tris nodded. 

"I never got the impression the two of you were that close," Briar confessed.  "It wasn't like he lived with us.  I mean, Frostpine didn't either, but he was always there at Winding Circle when Daja needed him, you know?  Niko was gone for months at a time…"  He thought for a moment.  "If it had been Niko instead of Rosethorn, dying from that awful blue pox, would you have done what I did?"

"I don't know," Tris said simply.  "I'm not you.  And Niko isn't Rosethorn.  Until I'm in that position, how could I know for certain what I would do?"

Briar snorted.  "That sounds like something Niko would say, at least." 

Sighing, Tris turned away from Briar to examine some of the books shelved in the small room.  "The truth is…"

The rattle of cups and plates interrupted whatever she was about to say.  The maid entered the book room with a tray laden with tea things, a plate of sandwiches and a bowl of fruit.  She placed the tray on the small round table at the center of the room and directed her question at Briar, "Will there be anything else?"

"When Dedicate Crane returns, show him in here, please?"  Briar's smile was warm and sunny, and the maid agreed with a giggle before she curtseyed and left them to their food. 

Pouring tea for both of them, Briar asked, "So, what was this book that was so interesting you skipped midday to keep reading?"

Tris took the cup he offered her and sat in one of the chairs flanking the table, reaching for a sandwich.  "Well, you know Ishabal Ladyhammer studied here at Lightsbridge?"

"Yes…?"

"She wrote a number of papers on curses and curse-breaking while she was here.  The library collected them into a book when she was appointed to Empress Berenene's court.  The papers leave out crucial details for safety reasons, of course, and they are more representative of her early work, but…"

Briar shook his head, chewing quickly so he could swallow his bite of sandwich.  "How could you want to read that, after all she did to you?"

Taking a bite out of her own sandwich, Tris chewed thoughtfully and swallowed before answering.  "I think it was because of what she did to me that I find it so interesting.  I would like to learn enough about curses to make sure I'm never caught like that again."  She sipped tea.  "I can disagree with the choices she's made and still respect the mind behind the work."

"When we were kids," Briar said, "I'd have said you were the least tolerant of the four of us.  You were always sticking your nose in the air when things weren't what you were used to and there were more things you squawked about hating than would admit to liking.  But now, I think you put us all to shame."

"How so?"

"Well… your willingness to see things from another's perspective.  I'm not sure I'd want to go poking around in the thoughts of someone who'd spent time and energy figuring out how to injure me so badly even if she made sure it wouldn't kill me.  Maybe especially if she didn't intend to kill me right away."

Tris shrugged.  "It was her job.  But I do get the sense she likes having control over others."

"I still don't know what they really hoped to gain from it."  Briar shook his head slowly.  "There had to be easier ways to delay us out of the country, and they can't possibly have hoped to recruit you after what they did to you."

"I think now, given other things I've read, Ishabal may have honestly thought I'd change my mind about leaving if she didn't leave me the choice.  In all her decision making, she seems very pragmatic.  If she has to do something, she tries to turn it to her advantage, rather than fight against it.  I think she expected me to do the same.  She had certainly thrown enough… enticements at me.  Her early offers to remain in Berenene's employ were extremely generous."

"Ha!"  Briar took an orange from the bowl of fruit and started peeling it.  "But our Tris has no love for fame or riches!  All she wants is a good book and a nice bit of stormy weather to play with!"

"Mmm…" Tris made a neutral noise and took another bite of her sandwich.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Briar poked, not sure he liked the look on Tris' face.

Tris turned to the door.  "Crane's here."  Briar poured tea into a third cup and set it by an empty chair.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I started with so many concerns. I considered and discarded several lines of questioning. But it all boils down to one point." Crane stopped pacing, placed his teacup firmly on the table. Meeting Tris' eyes earnestly he asked, "Aren't you… bored?"

Dedicate Crane paced a narrow path from the door to the book room table and back to the door, teacup rattling in his hand.Briar and Tris watched him, Tris fiddling with the cherry stems she'd recently discarded, Briar with his hands laced together behind his head.

"I've had a nice long walk to think about it.  I started with so many concerns.  I considered and discarded several lines of questioning.  But it all boils down to one point."  Crane stopped pacing, placed his teacup firmly on the table.  Meeting Tris' eyes earnestly he asked,  "Aren't you… bored?"

Tris laughed.  "How can I be bored?  Have you seen the Lightsbridge library?"

"But… a first year student?  I remember first year classes, and not fondly."  Crane picked up his teacup, took a sip of the cold brew and grimaced.  "You know the first year material well enough to teach it, I know you do.  What a waste of your time, sitting in those lectures!  Why couldn't you apply as an advanced student?  Or as a visiting lecturer?  Even Briar can manage that much…"  Crane put the teacup down again so he could rub his temples with his fingers. 

"Your confidence in my abilities is overwhelming," Briar commented dryly.   

"If your concern is…" Tris started, only for Crane to interrupt her.

"Don't you know that there are mages here who would give their left arm for a research assistant with your skills?"  Crane gestured vaguely toward the door he'd entered by.  "That poor fellow, Nepeta, is sitting on a treasury of incredibly potent plant specimens and nobody takes him seriously.  If he had an assistant of your caliber, he could actually write up his research so others might attempt replicating it!  Imagine the good his work could do for the healers here?  The potion makers?  Instead he is beset with accidents and gets no respect from his colleagues."

"I hardly see how that…" Tris began, but Crane kept talking.

"And as for your own work, don't you know that magic left unused is dangerous?  If you aren't exercising your own skills, you can lose the ability to control the power you have.  Most of the first year students are academic mages.  Their power comes from within them and has a natural limit."  He gestured, both palms together defining a narrow channel.  "Curbing their exercise is no hardship.  But the source of your power is, effectively, limitless."  Crane spread his long arms wide.  "I've seen you draw more power through yourself in a day than most people do in a lifetime.  You have it contained now, but what happens if you are called to assist in an emergency?  A natural disaster?  Or perhaps civil disorder?  When lives are at stake?  Without regular exercise of it, are you certain you will have the magical strength to control your power?  If it breaks free, are you willing to have the death of innocents on your conscience?"

"Of course I don't…"

But Dedicate Crane overrode her again.  "Furthermore, though the study of magic is always a life long pursuit, there comes a time when one can no longer simply be a passive vessel for information."  He smacked the back of one hand against the palm of the other to enumerate: "Books are not enough.  Attending lectures is not enough.  Merely listening to others is not enough.  You must hone your knowledge through argument, experimentation and active doing.  There is no better way."  He dropped to his knees in front of the seated woman, his expression pleading.  "I ask you again, Trisana: aren't you bored here as a first year student?"

Briar watched as the two mages stared at each other for a long moment.  It was a bit of a shock, realizing that Crane cared so much about this, cared so much about her.  And it was unsettling to see Tris, usually so quick with a biting comment when she felt she was being lectured, quiet in the face of this challenge. 

Tris finally broke the tension between them.  "You can't be comfortable on the floor like that.  Take a seat and I'll see if I can explain."

"More tea, Crane?" Briar offered, lifting the teapot.

The dedicate nodded and took the refreshed teacup with him as he sat back in one of the cushioned chairs around the table.  He sighed and took a sip of warm tea.  "Please, explain." 

Carefully, Tris removed her spectacles.  She polished their lenses on the corner of a napkin, then settled them back on her long nose.  "In Tharios, I nearly killed a man in cold blood.  The danger was not my magic.  At that moment, my magic was entirely controlled.  The danger was me.  I was angry, so angry for Glaki, so angry at this.. this _kak_ who had killed her mother, her foster mother and all those others.  Because of that anger, I was willing to take the law onto myself.  I appointed myself judge and executioner, and I was going to kill him.  I was going to kill him with my magic.  Yes, he was a horrible man, and yes, he was eventually condemned to death by the courts of Tharios, arguably a worse death than I would have given him, but…"  Tris was no longer looking at either of them, "if I had decided that killing him was my right, it would have made me no better than he was."

"What stopped you?" Dedicate Crane asked softly.

"Nico," Tris said flatly.

"If he hadn't been there…?" Briar asked tentatively, and watched Tris turn her head away from them.

"I've killed before.  You know that."

"Do you still have the nightmares?" Briar asked. 

Tris didn't answer him.  Instead she said, "We left Tharios not long after that.  Niko has mage friends all over.  On our return journey, I think we stopped to visit with near every one who could plausibly be on our route from Tharios to Emelan.  And every place we stayed, Niko would work the conversation around to ethical uses of power, and how even good mages can be tempted to make bad choices.  Everyone had a story about some mage they knew, had studied with who had let greed or anger or lust lead them into misusing their power."

Dedicate Crane frowned.  "So this… taking your training again is Master Goldeye's idea of penance?"

"No!"  Tris sat up straighter.  "This was my idea.  And it has nothing to do with penance."  She pushed her teacup toward Briar.  "More tea, please?"  Briar obliged her by filling her cup.

"So, then what?" Crane asked.

"Well, we stayed with many different kinds of mages living in many different circumstances: little village hedge wizards, grand city witches, mages in well appointed town houses or roadside waystations.  We had Glaki with us, so they all understood our need to stop and give her a few days to rest and eat proper food before we continued on.  Also, I had just learned how to see visions on the winds and I was still working on my ability to control what I saw."

"What?!"  Crane stood, splashing the dregs of his tea.  "You tried scrying the winds and you didn't go mad?"  He turned on Briar, who was calmly pouring tea into his own cup.  "You knew about this?"

"We still share a magical connection, remember?"  Briar shrugged.  "And she doesn't *try* to scry the winds.  I know she sees visions on 'em.  She's saved our lives doing it."

"Asaia save us," Crane muttered, dropping back into his chair.

"The other mages were polite enough, at first," Tris continued.  "Some just assumed I was still Niko's student, or a woman he'd hired to nurse Glaki.  When they heard I had my own magic, most shrugged it off.  I know I look young.  And for some reason, people don't think you can be a powerful mage if you're sitting with a child in your lap.  I don't know why, they just don't."

Briar snorted.  "I hear you on that.  Everyone assumes green mages are kind and gentle, romping through the fields, innocent as daisies and strawberries.  They see the bouquet of roses and don't even consider we might be hiding thorns."

"Unfortunately, the harder I tried to block out the unwanted visions, the more my control slipped.  I had trouble blocking out stray images and sounds.  They just came to me, all jumbled together on every breeze.  I heard people saying I was a liar or must have simply gone mad already.  That was so comforting, as you can imagine," Tris commented sourly.  "They said Niko must be protecting me for sexual reasons, or bragging about my ability for prideful ones.  They hadn't seen me do any normal magic, not the kind of magic they understood anyway.  Too often, even powerful academic mages have a difficult time seeing ambient power, so they dismiss it as unimportant or maybe not even real magic.  I heard more than one person flat out insist I couldn't possibly be a mage.  I heard all the nasty stuff people say when they think nobody else is listening.  And then to my face they would smile at me and say kind things.  It grew very hard to trust anyone."

"I'll bet," Briar muttered.  Crane frowned and leaned forward slightly.

Tris took a deep breath, exhaled and tried to school her features into a neutral expression.  "And then something would happen.  A nasty storm would threaten the crops.  Kidnappers thought Glaki's magic would make her a valuable slave.  The foundation of a big public building would be eroded by groundwater and unsafe, but I was the only person who could tell.  So I'd say something.  People wouldn't take me seriously.  Then, when the storm hit, they'd blame me for it.  When I kept Glaki safe, the said I had been imagining danger where there was none, causing trouble, making noise just to get attention." 

"But sometimes innocent lives were in danger and I had to do something."  Tris shrugged.  She took a mouthful of tea and swallowed hard, then put her cup back down carefully.  The other two mages kept a respectful silence.  "So I did."

After a long moment, Crane prompted her, "And…?"

Tris glanced up at the dedicate.  "It didn't matter how careful I had been.  It didn't matter how many lives I had saved.  Those who had smiled at me before now frowned.  They'd make signs against the evil eye and hide their children.  Glaki would cry because none of her new friends would play with her anymore." 

"There are small minded people everywhere," Crane insisted.  "Surely the mages understood…?"

Shaking her head, Tris said, "Even if people weren't being fair to me, I understand why they reacted the way they did.  I'm young.  I don't look powerful or interesting or… or special in any way, really.  And then if I do something that makes them see just how much power I have, it frightens them.  But it was worse with the mages.  They were often quite complimentary, in public at least.  I'd saved lives.  I'd saved property.  I'd saved the town council gold they didn't have to spend on workers. 

"But some of them were afraid too.  What if I wanted their position?  What if the people who paid them decided they didn't need a mage who couldn't do what I did?  They were jealous of my power.  They'd start with the questions: when did I get my medallion?  So young?  And where had I studied, again?  How long was I there? Who had taught me?  Sometimes they'd try testing me.  Sometimes their tests were not entirely… fair.  Or they'd simply deny I'd had anything to do with the magic at all, claim my medallion must be faked.  They'd accuse Niko of fraud.  Then the really nasty rumors would start getting whispered around.  I had drunk the blood of innocents to gain my power, and was using Glaki as a source.  I was going to steal their children next.  I sucked men dry of power, and used it to control Niko's mind.  I had made a bargain with hateful gods and our presence was a curse on everyone.  We learned that once the whispering became muttering, it was time move on." 

She took another sip of tea, but her hand shook a little when she put the cup down.  "Because once they started muttering, there was always someone to come around asking: How much does it cost to get you to kill someone for me?"

Silence reigned for a long moment.

"I have to admit, it's still a temptation.  People offered me… everything they could think of.  I could write my own ticket in any number of noble houses from Capchen to Sotat.  We already know how desperate Empress Berenene was to add me to her stable of mages.  I could be wealthy beyond even Daja's dreams, more politically powerful than Sandry… more romantically sought after than Briar."  Tris twisted her mouth in a bitter smile.  "All I have to do is be willing to kill on command."

"If it weren't for Glaki, I might have even said yes to some of them." 

Briar leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees.  "What did she do?"

"It's not what she did, it's who she is," Tris explained with a soft smile.  "Glaki has academic magic.  When I first met her, she squished one of my little dust devils.  She exhibited all the classic signs of a young mage.  And she's bright as anything. Niko advised me and taught her some things, but I took responsibility for her.  As we traveled, Glaki and I played together, ate together, meditated together, and I started teaching her the basics of how to control her magic.  And in showing her what I wanted to do, I realized, though I may be an ambient mage, there's nothing stopping me from using my power, whatever its source, the way an academic mage does."

"But why would you want to do that?" Briar asked.  "Ambient magic works on different principles, so we use different methods.  Why would you want to complicate it with a bunch of hand signs and formal phrases?"

Crane agreed.  "Training academic magic is all about learning to pull the magical power from within a person so you can channel it along specific pathways.  Ambient magic, by its nature, is defined by its source, such as weather for you, or plants for myself and Briar.  Adding too many limits on top of it tends to impede working.  It doesn't add anything but complication.  Yes, an ambient mage must to learn how to allow their magic flow in a controlled manner, but it's not the same kind of control at all."

Tris looked at Dedicate Crane curiously.  "Isn't it?  I'm not so sure about that anymore."

"But why?" Briar asked again.  "What do you gain by learning academic magic?  You're always going to be an ambient mage.  Learning the academic forms doesn't change the source of your power."

Tris patted the thick veil wrapping the mass of braids both men knew were pinned up underneath, making sure the folds were still secure.  "Well, Niko would try to teach Glaki more academic methods of working, but he doesn't have a lot of practical experience with children that young.  I mean, she's bright, but there are limits to what a child can understand.  So I would watch Niko's methods, and then I'd imitate them, but slow everything down, exaggerate the hand gestures and the words, and repeat it as often as Glaki had patience for.  It got to be a bit of a habit.  The next couple times I stepped in to fix something, I did them at what she called "Glaki-speed" so that she could watch what I did and maybe learn something.  But the funny thing was, even though I was doing exactly the same sorts of things I had been doing before, the fact that it took much longer and that I waved my arms around while I did them… changed everything.  Nobody accused me of faking my powers.  Nobody accused me of showing off or bragging.  Personally, I find it much harder to do the correct gestures and remember to say the right words while I'm working magic, and deliberately slowing something down takes a whole lot more control.  But people didn't look at me like I was about to steal their babies.  And older mages just smiled approvingly and said things like how they could see I was making progress.  I actually got paid once or twice.  And nobody asked me to harm anyone for it." 

Tris sat back in her chair.  "So, if I'm going to do more work like an academic mage, I wanted to learn how to do it right, from the beginning.  So, here I am, a first year student at Lightsbridge."

Dedicate Crane pursed his lips.  "My dear Trisana, you are an extraordinary person with an extraordinary gift.  Why should you care so much about what ignorant people think of your methods?  Are you really going to spend the rest of your life trying to pretend you are… so much less than you are?"

"Do you think academic magic a lesser discipline, then?" Tris inquired blandly.

Slightly flustered, Dedicate Crane denied, "No, no!  Not at all!  What I meant was, why wouldn't you want to work with your magic in the way that came most naturally?  Why would you spend so much time and effort on what is essentially an elaborate masquerade?  Your power is a great gift!  You could do so much good in this world with it!  Why would you even want to attempt to disguise it?"

Lifting both eyebrows, Tris regarded the older man.  "Haven't you been listening?  I need to be able to make a living somehow, and I don't want to have to kill or injure people to do it.  Have you any better idea of how I am supposed to support myself?"

Crane folded his hands thoughtfully.  "You could pledge yourself to the Living Circle," he suggested quietly.  "Asaia Bird Winged would be an apt patroness for your talents."

Briar barked a mirthless laugh.  "You want Tris to swear herself as an Air Dedicate?  She's got just as much power with water and earth than she does air.  She's even worked with lava.  Why shouldn't she swear to Shurri Firesword?"  Briar shook his head violently.  "Gods," he muttered bitterly.

Tris stood calmly and brushed crumbs from her skirts.  "Thank you both for the hospitality.  But it's getting late and I have an early lecture to attend tomorrow."  She spared another glance for Dedicate Crane in his yellow habit.  "I'll think about your suggestion.  I don't believe I have a calling, and it would be just as much a masquerade to pretend I did as it is to learn the forms of academic magic.  But I will think about it."

"Do."  Crane rose and took Tris' hand.  "I hope that your path leads you to where you can be happy… as yourself."

"Thank you."  Tris turned away quickly, blinking rapidly. 

Briar stood and stretched, shaking off his frown.  "Wait up, Tris.  I'll walk you out."


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You're just jealous," Briar teased lightly.
> 
> "Yes, probably," Tris agreed calmly. 

When the maid brought Tris her apron, still wadded in a careless bundle, Tris took great pleasure in tipping with the same small coin the maid had given Tris earlier, when she'd delivered Crane's note to Briar.The maid smiled sourly.Her expression deepened into a slight frown when Briar brushed past her to accompany Tris out the door and down the front steps.Tris had been expecting the loud noise as the maid slammed the door closed behind them, but Briar jumped slightly. 

"Why is she like that all of a sudden?" Briar complained.

"Because you're paying attention to me now and earlier you probably paid a lot of extremely flattering attention to her," Tris explained reasonably.  "Had you already invited her into your bed or were you still working up to it?"

Briar objected.  "I didn't!"  Then he reconsidered.  "I'll make it up to her." 

Tris clucked her tongue at him.

"You're just jealous," Briar teased lightly.

"Yes, probably," Tris agreed calmly.  "Good night, Viynain Moss," she bid him formally.

Tris was several steps away before Briar gathered his wits to chase after her.  "Hey, wait!  I'll walk with you."

Pausing to let him catch up, she inquired, "are you sure you'll be able to find your way back?  My dormitory is pretty far from here."

"My shakkan's up in the room.  If I get lost, I'll just follow it home." Briar shrugged.  "So, when you say you're jealous…"

Tris' long nose twitched as she cut off what he was about to say.  "I smell cider.  Didn't you say your hosts were tapping a keg of cider tonight?"

One of the larger houses ahead of them seemed to shake slightly.  Abruptly, its front door burst open, disgorging a collection of colorfully robed mages all shushing each other loudly.  Most had beakers or tankards of liquid in hand.  They milled about in front of the house until one of them shushed them all more loudly than the rest.  “Now, let’s try this again.  Maybe out here we won’t have as many interruptions.”  The woman speaking glared in the direction of the house.  “C’mon everyone.  Just focus!  Everybody got their starting pitches?  Okay.”  She lifted her hands in a swooping gesture. 

Tris flinched at the resulting sound, as half a dozen mages all took deep breaths and started singing with lusty enthusiasm, but no great skill.  Briar struggled to keep a straight face, but lost the battle quickly.  "Oh, dear," he chortled.  "I think I see our hosts in that mob.  Shall I introduce you?"

Tris shook her head quickly.  "Do you really want to get any closer to the source of… that?" 

"Don't you like music, Tris?" Briar asked as she towed him in the opposite direction.

"I enjoy music," she said pointedly.  "But that…?"  She was so intent on escaping, she didn't notice the dark robed figure on the ground until she nearly stumbled over her.  "Oh, I'm so sorry.  Excuse me." 

A sad, pale face peered up at the pair, then suddenly lit with a smile.  "Briar Moss!"

Briar recognized the woman instantly.  He dropped to one knee in front of her.  "Lecturer Batnose, what a pleasant surprise to find you here this fine evening." 

"Call me Dita," the woman insisted, as Briar recoiled from the scent of alcohol on her breath.

He recovered quickly.  "And you can call me Briar.  What are you doing out here, Dita?"

The fallen mage struggled to sit up.  "I was returning home from the committee meeting when I decided to… take a short rest."  Her speech was slow, deliberate and full of injured dignity.  "I may have had too much cider," she confessed in a loud whisper. 

"Do you live far from here, Dita?" Briar inquired, with an inquiring glance at Tris.  Tris nodded agreement with him.  Sometimes they didn't need words to communicate.  "My companion and I would be happy to escort you home, if you've finished your committee business for the night."

"Oh, yes," Dita Batnose insisted.  "I am all finished with committee business for tonight!"  She reached out to Briar, who helped steady her as she regained her feet.  "All finished."  She waved her arms in a decisive gesture to indicate how very finished she was, and nearly lost her balance again.  Tris came up and steadied her from the other side.  When Dita had regained her equilibrium she looked at Tris, and her face fell.  She sighed.  "Oh.  A ladyfriend.  I should have known.  All the attractive ones are taken."

"This is my sss…" Briar started.

"Student Liaison," Tris finished smoothly.  "I've been asked to serve as a local guide for Mage Moss and Dedicate Crane while they're here."

Dita blinked owlishly at Tris for a long moment.  "Hey, I know you, don't I?"

"We met this afternoon, actually.  I was helping Professor Nepeta…"

"…with his specimens!" Dita cried in triumphal recognition.  "And you got him out of the hall again right quickly afterwards!"  Responding to the pressure of Briar's hand around her waist, Dita began walking.  "I owe you one, actually.  Whenever Nepeta brings those specimens out I'm never sure if he's going to cause another… incident like the last one.  I mean, technically I don't have to invite him to speak, but he almost never leaves his work room anymore, and I didn't think he'd want the competition of…"  She glanced at Briar and seemed to forget her train of thought.  "Gosh, you've got lovely cheekbones," she told him earnestly.

"What happened, the last time Professor Nepeta brought his specimens out?" Tris asked. 

Batnose seemed not to have heard her.  Briar repeated the question as a request.  "Would you tell me what happened the last time Nepeta brought his specimens out?"

"Oh, he is so dangerous."  She turned to Tris warningly.  "You should remember that.  He's dangerous.  His plants are dangerous.  They'll make you want to do things you normally don't want to do at all.  Or at least not much."  Her head swiveled around again to face Briar again.  "Or really, that you want to do but you know is a very, very bad idea."

Briar smoothed a lock of hair away from the drunk mage's face.  "What happened last time?"

Batnose sighed.  "It's not so bad when he brings out the herbs good for relaxation and promoting sleep.  Students are going to sleep through his lectures anyway.  There’s no harm done if they get too close to the chamomile.  But one day he brought out all the aphrodisiac herbs.  All of them.  At once.  Can you imagine?"  She shuddered.  “At least the students had the sense not to go near them!”  She paused, then insisted, "Not that I was there for it.  Not that anyone who saw me there will admit to it," she amended.

"Good to know," Tris muttered. 

"He used to have a wakeflower specimen," Dita Batnose continued.  "The university made him destroy it because students kept stealing it to use in their pranks."

"He managed to cultivate a wakeflower this far north?" Briar sounded impressed. 

"Oh, yes!  He's got all sorts of strange plants in that work room of his.  But if you go… remember what I said.  Very dangerous.  You probably shouldn't spend too much time there, and for all that you find holy, don't touch any of his plants!"  Dita regarded her two supporters sternly, then belched loudly.  "Oh, that feels much better."

They were back where they started, or nearly, only a few houses away from where Briar and Crane were staying.  The small scrap of garden in the front of the house where they had stopped was unusual.  In the dark, Tris couldn’t see much but a low lying carpet of green with several artistically placed ornamental rocks. 

"What a delightful moss garden!" Briar exclaimed. 

Dita Batnose looked around in surprise.  "Oh!  You brought me home!"

Briar walked the still tipsy mage up the steps to her door, while Tris stood back and watched for mishap.  When the housemaid had collected the drunken woman and closed the door on Briar, he descended the steps slowly, surveying the moss garden with pleasure.  "I wonder if she does her own gardening?" Briar murmured.  “Nice work.  Now let's get you home."

"Are you sure?  It’s getting late.“

"I'm sure," Briar insisted, taking Tris' arm.

Tris and Briar fell into step again and strolled in companionable silence.  Tris led them along an alternate route, where they could hear the off-key choral exercises of the drunken mage committee only distantly. 

At last, Briar ventured again, "So, when you say you're jealous…?"

"Hmm," Tris said, not answering.  She pulled her arm from Briar's grip and he let her go.  After a long pause she finally said,  "I wish I found it as as easy as you do.  Flirting. And all that.  I'm jealous of how easy it seems to be for you.  People like your company.  Girls like you.  You wink, you smile, they fall over themselves to race you up the stairs and see who can pull their clothes off first."  She paused.  "It looks like fun," she admitted at last.  "I wish I could do that."

"Are you like Daja, then?  You're interested in women?" Briar asked, just a little too carefully.

"No.  I like men.  Well, I like some of them."  Tris sighed.  “That's another thing.  You seem absolutely delighted with… everyone.  Some of the girls you go walking out with… how can you stand them?  They're not terribly intelligent.  Some of them don't even seem to have personalities!  They're pretty pieces of furniture with nice hair.  I have trouble telling them apart sometimes." 

"They aren't that bad," Briar defended.

“Maybe I’m just too picky.”  Tris shrugged.

Briar chuckled.  "You're prickly, you mean."

"That too, probably," Tris agreed.  "But when I meet a man I do like… and I want to get to know them better in… you know, that way…"

Silence stretched between them.

"Well… what happens?" Briar prodded impatiently, bumping her shoulder with his own.

"Nothing, generally," Tris said with a mildly confused expression.  "Nobody I've been attracted to lately has returned the interest.  At least, not that I can tell.“

"You do have to make a bit of an effort, you know.  Do you go out of your way to talk to them or spend time with them or anything?" Briar quizzed.

Tris nodded.  “Of course I do.  But I’m not very good at those games women seem to have to play to get a man’s attention.  I haven’t had enough practice, I suppose.  I don’t suppose you could teach me what I’m supposed to do?” 

Briar hesitated.

“Never mind,” Tris continued smoothly.  “It’s bad enough that I can never remember all these little unwritten social rules at parties about who I can talk to and for how long and about what subjects.  Sandry was helping me with that, but… It’s like how people see me and can’t believe I’m powerful.  They see me and can’t believe I have feelings, either.  When I try to express myself I only end up making the men I’m interested in… uncomfortable.  There's something about me they must find unpleasant.  Am I too cold, perhaps?  Maybe it's being prickly, as you said."

Briar disagreed with sudden violence.  "No!  That's not what I meant at all!  And there's absolutely nothing wrong with you, prickly or not!"  He captured one of her hands and pressed it firmly between his own.  "In fact, some people happen to like prickly.  You should have seen Rosethorn in Gyonxe.  Talk about prickly people!  She and… well… it's not my story to tell.  But anyone worthy of your attention will want you for who you are, as much because of your prickles as despite them."

Tris squeezed his hand and let go.  "You're sweet, Briar.  Thank you."  They fell into step again, close enough that their hands brushed past each other occasionally.

A few moments later, Briar commented, "You know, I think tonight I've heard you talk more about yourself than I have since we were kids and you were teaching me to read.  Just like we were up on the roof of Discipline cottage, with nothing to do but talk and watch the stars come out."

"It's certainly warm enough for it."  Tris looked up.  "Spring here was very wet, but the summer has been very dry.  What I wouldn't give for a good thundershower right about now."

"The plants around here could certainly use it," Briar agreed.

Their feet crunched on gravel, as Tris indicated to Briar with a nudge of her shoulder that they were to take the rightmost fork in the path.  The walk wound around a tall circular tower flanked by spreading trees.  Dense, overarching limbs sheltered them, creating a dark tunnel of unbroken stillness.

"Do you have people here to talk to?" Briar broke the hush by asking. "It seems like it could get lonely here." 

"Of course I have people to talk to.  I live in the dormitories.  I'm surrounded by people all the time."

"Ah," Briar pursued, "But do you talk to them?"

"We talk," Tris insisted, a bit crossly. 

"About what?"

"Homework sets.  Meals.  We debate the merits of various teachers."

Briar sighed.  "Poor Tris."

Tris dug her heels into the gravel and stopped.  "What do you mean: Poor Tris?"

Briar came around to face her.  He could barely see her in the darkness of the shadows, but the glow of her magic outlined her face to his inner vision.  "I think it's been too long since you've been able to relax and just be yourself with another person.  You don't make friends easily.  You never have.  And living under an assumed name probably isn't helping you any.  We practically had to force you to accept our friendship in the beginning.  If we hadn't been living in each others heads all those years, after we got our medallions would you even have acknowledged knowing me?"  After too long of a pause he added hastily, "Or Daja? Or Sandry?"

"Of course I would," Tris defended.  "But would you have acknowledged knowing me?  You didn't want to open your magical connection to us again when you came back from Yanjing and Gyonxe."

"Neither did you, after Tharios."

"That's different," Tris insisted.  "I didn't want…"

"It's the same," Briar insisted tiredly.  "None of us wanted to really open to each other because it's scary.  Being vulnerable is frightening because you think they're going to judge you as harshly as you judge yourself.  And if they knew, if they really knew who you were inside, you think they wouldn't like you."  Briar dared reach out, caressing the curve of her cheek with his fingers.  "I see you, Tris.  Even in this darkness.  I see you.  And I like you."

Shivering slightly, Tris asked, "Do you, Briar?  Do you really see me?"  She leaned her face into the palm of his hand.  Her skin was soft and hot.  Was she blushing?  Briar couldn't see that in the darkness.  But he did note the surge as her magic momentarily swamped her control.  Lightning crackled where they touched.

Tris pulled herself away, stealing the warmth from Briar's hand.  Electricity stretched between them a few inches then snapped, loudly.  Briar yelped.  His arm spasmed as pain shot up clear through to his shoulder.  The trees above them trembled as if gripped by a strong wind, then subsided as the pain in Briar's arm subsided to a gentle tingling.

"Ow," Briar said, rubbing the place on his hand that was still numb.  "It's a good thing I still have a little of your magic in me, or that might have killed me."

"Oh, Briar.  I am so sorry," Tris whispered.  She took another step back.  "I…"

"Hey, it's okay.  But Crane is right.  You have to use the energy you have.  You can't just let it sit there and build up.  Especially your kind of magic."  He tried to keep his tone light, conversational.  "When was the last time you did a major working?"

"It's been a while."  Tris sounded mortified.

"We'll be here at least a week," Briar told her.  "We can concoct some excuse to cover for you spending your energy a little.  I'll make sure you can get some exercise.  It's not good, bottling yourself all in like that."

"No.  Not good."

"Come on.  Let's get you back to your dorm, where you can get a good night's sleep.  I'll come find you after Crane and I talk to the healers tomorrow."

Tris agreed, but kept a careful arm's length away from Briar as he walked her most of the rest of the way.  Briar kept up a flow of inconsequential chatter, Tris mostly answering in monosyllables. 

When they were within sight of the multi-storied dormitory, Tris stopped him.  "You should go back and get some rest too.  You've been traveling hard." 

Yawning, Briar stretched.  "We have.  But this stroll was just what I needed.  It's nice not being on a horse for a while.  I'll sleep well tonight."

"Good."  Tris edged away from him.  “Well, goodnight."

"Goodnight, Coppercurls."  Briar stepped in quickly and caught her cheek gently as she started to turn.  Cradling her face in his hands, he pressed a quick, firm kiss on her tightly closed mouth.  He stepped back with a chuckle.  "Just checking.  Don't worry.  You won't knock every suitor you meet on his ass."  He reconsidered, and grinned.  "At least, not with a lightning bolt."

"Oh." Tris said, intelligently.  "Good." 

Briar watched her run from him.  When she reached the sanctuary of the large student house, he waited until she'd disappeared inside to turn away and retrace his steps though the darkness.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You've finally woken up. Or rather, you're asleep and dreaming, but you've joined me in the waking dream of Garmashing."

Rosethorn was sitting up on her pillows waiting for him when he fell asleep."Well, it took you long enough to get here," she barked impatiently."I'm almost done with this." 

"This" was something soft and floppy in Rosethorn's lap.  Above her, spindly legs arching down on either side of her like the supports of a great bed canopy, stood a giant spider.  It was extruding fine silk from its spinnerets.  The silk line dangled, caught in Rosethorn's free hand as she looped it around and pulled it through her work with a pair of pointed sticks. 

"Lark's teaching me to knit during the day.  I figured I might as well get a little extra practice with all this time I gain at night.  It keeps these dreams from getting too dull.  Or too exciting."  Rosethorn looked up at the spider above her.  "Isn't that right?"

The spider chittered.

"What's going on, Rosethorn?  This feels so real."  Briar reached out to touch the blankets draped over his teacher's feet.  They felt solid, the wool slightly scratchy under the scarred palm of his hand. 

"You can touch that?" Rosethorn asked, surprise lighting her face.  "That's new!"  She wiggled her toes under the blankets. 

Briar reached out with both hands, trying to catch her feet, but only one hand connected.  The other passed through the bed as if the blankets, mattress, Rosethorn and all were made of mist.  Or perhaps, one of his arms was insubstantial, and the other was real.  But which was which?

"And as for what's happened, you've finally woken up.  Or rather, you're asleep and dreaming, but you've joined me in the waking dream of Garmashing."

"What's that, again?"  It sounded so familiar.  Briar knew if she could just give him another  clue, all the pieces would fall into place. 

Rosethorn sighed and set her knitting to one side.  "It's like this…"

She explained it to him.  He knew she was explaining it to him.  Her mouth moved and sounds came out.  Her hands gestured meaningfully.  At the end of her speech, she picked her knitting back up and relaxed into her pillows once again. 

"I'm sorry," Briar apologized.  "But I didn't catch that…?"

Sighing with asperity, Rosethorn admitted, "Okay, so maybe you're not entirely awake yet.  But you're more substantial than I've seen you here and you're more lucid than ever, so something's definitely changed."  She looked at him, almost glaring.  In the middle of her forehead, her eyelashes fluttered.  But that third eye, the one Briar kept forgetting Rosethorn possessed, did not open.  "Something must have happened to you today, something significant that has woken you up, at least a little.  Try to figure out what it was, do whatever it was some more, and see if you're able to wake all the way up.  I could use some help here, and there's nobody I'd rather have here with me than you, Briar."

Briar blurted out, "I love you, Rosethorn."

His teacher smiled fondly at him.  "I know you do, you daft boy.  I love you too."  Then the two eyes on either side of her nose widened as she looked past him.  "Aha!  Maybe she can help."

Briar turned.  Where there should be a wall, if this were Rosethorn's bedroom, was a giant window, framed with bones and looking out over a great chasm.  On the other side of the gap, the walls and towers of the Namornese capitol rose.  At the very top of the highest wall overlooking the great Trickster Syth stood Tris.

Her long nose was disguised by the beak of the mask she wore.  From her shoulders fluttered a cape decorated all over with feathers of hammered copper.  But it was definitely Tris.  Briar tried opening his magical connection to her.

_Tris?_

She did not reply, but Briar felt her touch his mind softly, inviting him to share what she felt.  Tris lifted her arms to the oncoming storm and Briar suddenly realized she was naked beneath her cape, her curves full and juicy looking.  Briar felt the blush of heat ripen across her breasts and up into her face as her breath came fast and her eyes closed, not needing external vision to reach out and touch the source of all she desired.

When the lightning came, so did Tris.

Briar woke, panting, his sheets a mess.  He was in an unfamiliar bed, and the night noises were nothing like he was used to yet.  He wiped himself off carefully, wishing now he had not turned down the maid's offer of companionship.  His dreams remained only in isolated flashes of images: a giant spider, bleached bones, a yawning chasm, a great electrical storm.  Shivering despite the warmth still in the night air, Briar dragged his blankets onto the floor of the room. 

He still wasn't sleeping well, despite all the mind healers could do for him.  Briar hoped fatigue wouldn't impede his search for a cure for Rosethorn.  Well, if he couldn't sleep, he could at least rest his body.  Curling up comfortably on the floor, Briar entertained himself pruning imaginary shakkans until dawn.  It wasn't as good as sleep, but it was better than no rest at all.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first class Tris had that day was Charm Crafting. Fortunately, the lecture was short and covered material Tris knew already. She kept finding her attention drawn to the pictures brought to her on the warm breeze blowing through the window. Someone outside the building started whistling a version of the song the committee choir had tried singing. Lecturer Glassmane flinched and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Despite her unusually late night, Tris woke early the next morning, feeling as full of energy as if she'd absorbed an inch of the tidal power she stored in her braids. After dressing, she sat next to the open window in her bedroom for a long while, just watching and listening on the wind as the University woke up and started the day. 

The first class Tris had that day was Charm Crafting. Fortunately, the lecture was short and covered material Tris knew already. She kept finding her attention drawn to the pictures brought to her on the warm breeze blowing through the window. Someone outside the building started whistling a version of the song the committee choir had tried singing. Lecturer Glassmane flinched and pinched the bridge of his nose. 

As he passed stacks of slim wooden rectangles out to each of the communal work tables Glassmane asked, "And who can tell me what kind of wood this is?"

Tris was pretty sure even before one of the slices of wood had been handed to her that it was going to be beech wood. The color and grain confirmed it. She knew they were going to carve spells for happiness today. That much was written in chalk on the large slate sheet propped in the front of the room. Beech was inexpensive, easy to work and was commonly used for happiness charms. She wondered how many of the other students had figured this out. A few hands went up, volunteering answers, all wrong. 

"No, this is beech wood," Glassmane insisted, looking pained. “And it was listed as the top choice for this type of charm in the reading I assigned last week. Today we're going to inscribe this design," he turned to the slate sheet and quickly drew a fairly complicated charm to promote happiness in one's love life. "No, wait. This is first year charms," he muttered to himself while erasing the complicated design. He drew a much simpler design Tris saw was only designed to promote simple happiness. Daja had used that design in a belt buckle she’d made as a going away gift for Tris. "I want each of you to try inscribing this design on on the beech tablet you have in front of you. Yes, I will be awarding partial credit for neatness and artistry, so at least try to make it legible. Then you will attempt to charge the design with power and bring it up to me for evaluation." He reached over and removed a chisel from one eager student's hand. "And let me get the wards up first."

Slowly, Glassmane made a circuit of the room, activating spell wards to contain any magical accidents that might occur while the students worked. As she waited for the lecturer to finish this necessary step, Tris caressed the smoothly planed surface of the beech tablet, wondering what Briar would make of this lesson. He'd probably make the slice of wood sprout leaves and bark, Tris thought with a smile. She sighed, then caught herself sighing, and straightened in her seat. Maybe Briar was right and she had kept herself too isolated. 

Because she’d made a mistake, being too honest with Briar last night. But it was so easy to fall back into comfortable conversation with him. So when he’d touched her, her body had betrayed her, admitting quite clearly how much she desired him in a less than sisterly manner. Tris hoped his misunderstanding had been genuine. It had been hard enough trying to explain away her jealousy as an intellectual issue. The circle of friendship they’d shared, the four of them: Briar, Tris, Sandry and Daja, meant so much to her. Tris didn’t want to jeopardize it in any way. Throwing herself at Briar was a terrible idea, no matter what the outcome. Either she would have to nurse the pain of rejection, or, what was possibly worse, they’d have do navigate the inevitable complications that starting a physical relationship between them would cause. There was too great a danger that their struggle would unbalance the sometimes precarious harmony of their foster family. 

“The wards are up,” Lecturer Glassmane told his students tiredly. “You can start working now.”

Using a piece of charcoal, Tris free-handed a copy of the charm design on the wooden blank in front of her. She licked her finger to erase a few stray lines, and redrew one curve slightly to balance the overall design a little better. Some of the other students hadn’t bothered marking their pieces and were already carving their wood. Tris always tried to pace herself and do the work carefully. It didn’t win her anything to be the first in the class to finish a project. 

Taking a small chisel from the work tray she shared with the other students at her table, Tris placed the sharp metal implement at the lower left corner of the design at an angle. Briar hated being around wood carving, which never seemed to make sense to Tris, given how ruthless he was about pruning plants back when they needed it. She smiled at the sudden mental image of Briar bent over his shakkan, snipping leaves and warning the plant to behave itself. Shaking her head, she pushed the image away. She needed to bury these feelings deep. Deeper. 

She knew the moment the chisel dug into the wood she wasn’t focused properly. Her feelings had responded to her half formed impulse to bury them, drawing her magic in their wake. They’d sunk into the earth and found lava buried deep under the bedrock. Tris’ magic became a conduit for this familiar heat. 

Immense power coursed through her. Tris tried to shove the magic back into place, but realized quickly that wouldn’t work. She needed to channel it somehow, keep it moving so she could pull it around and send it back to where it came from. The tip of her chisel began to glow and a faint wisp of smoke rose from the beech wood plaque. The magic responded sluggishly to her control, like the molten rock oozing slowly through underground channels, but it did respond. 

Tris was trembling and sweaty by the time she’d finished pulling the lava’s power around and sent it back to its source. Carefully gathering her emotions back into herself, Tris saw that her magic had followed the pattern on the wood she’d described with charcoal markings. Her charm was complete. The deep, even grooves of the pattern had been charred darkly into the warm brown wood, but they blazed silver in her magical sight. 

As an afterthought, Tris pulled the heat out of the chisel, making the room only slightly warmer, and set the tool down next to her completed charm. Looking around, Tris saw that her classmates were all still busy over their crafting. 

“Having trouble, Cheeseman?” The lecturer stood behind her, peering over her shoulder at the work on the table. 

Tris braced herself for the inevitable. “Finished, I think.”

“You think?” Tris could never quite tell when Glassmane was being playful and when he was being sarcastic. “Well, bring it up to my bench and I’ll take a look.”

Lecturer Glassmane had his own work bench set up in the front of the room. Several tall stools clustered around it. “Have a perch,” he invited, gesturing toward a stool. Tris took a seat at right angles to him and placed the charm between them. Glassmane fished in a pocket for a pair of spectacles not unlike her own, and secured them on the bridge of his nose. “All right. Let’s see what we have here.”

Tris saw him flinch.

“Wrong glasses,” Glassmane muttered, averting his eyes and pulling the spectacles off his face quickly. He patted various places in his clothes, distractedly. Then, frowning, he picked his spectacles off the work bench again and examined them. “Huh. Right glasses.” With a pondering look on his face, he set the glasses aside once more and picked up Tris’ charm. He turned it over in his hands, scraped a bit of the burned channel with a fingernail then brought the whole thing close to his face and sniffed it. Then he set the charm down and picked his glasses up again. He hesitated before placing the lenses before his eyes, but when he did so, he looked not at the charm, but the girl who'd made it. 

Defiantly, Tris lifted her chin at Lecturer Glassmane. If she’d done something wrong, he should just tell her. He peered up and down her plump frame, even peeking around to peer into her ear at one point. He squinted appraisingly, then sucked air through his front teeth in a quiet whistle and shoved the spectacles up to rest on top of his wild mop of hair. 

“What did you use?”

“A chisel,” Tris spoke with perfect, if incomplete, honesty.

Glassmane lifted sandy pale eyebrows. Pushing the wooden charm aside, into Tris’ work space, Lecturer Glassmane reached across the bench to grab a chisel from a tray of various tools sitting ready. He twiddled it between his fingers. “Will this one do?”

“Do you want me to make another charm?”

“Mmmm… not quite. Try this.” He handed the chisel to Tris and snagged a piece of drawing charcoal and some paper. Quickly he drew the more complicated charm he’d chalked on the slate earlier, the one for romantic happiness. He placed it firmly on the work bench next to Tris’ charm. “Can you turn that,” he pointed at the wooden charm, “into one with this design?” He pointed at the paper.

“May I?” Tris inquired with an attempt at politeness as she stole the piece of drawing charcoal from in front of her teacher. The new charm looked complicated, but as she studied it, it became clear that it was built on the base of the simpler one. It was a fun puzzle, adding the extra strokes that created the pattern of the new charm on the bones of the old. But she wasn’t sure if she could charge the rest of the design with magic without damaging the original working.

Glassmane took her hesitation as an invitation. He leaned over her work to compare the two. “Yep. You figured the trick of it. Now what do you do?”

Taking a deep breath, Tris admitted, “It was a mistake.”

“Oh. So you’re saying you can’t replicate what you did?” The lecturer sounded almost disappointed.

“Oh, I could probably replicate the original, but it wasn’t intentional,” Tris confessed. “So, I’m not entirely sure how to add the new parts into the old working. That wasn’t covered in the reading.”

Lecturer Glassmane ran his deeply tanned hands through his pale hair to retrieve his spectacles. “Why don’t you try something you think might work? Make another mistake,” he invited her. “Make a dozen mistakes. That’s how you learn. That’s why we put the wards up, you know. What could go wrong?”

Tris knew what could go wrong, but the invitation was too good to pass up. She needed to exercise her power. If she couldn’t do it here, under wards and supervision where was she supposed to, how was she supposed to keep a practiced grip on her magic? 

Tris reached deep for the lava power again, this time intentionally. It roared into her. She had to work to keep it from overwhelming her again, but it was easier this time. She worked with it in the way she was most familiar, drawing a thread of the power through her, twisting it like fiber, focusing it into a fine point. She realized she didn’t need the chisel and set it down. The magic was eager to jump into the pattern again. Tris split the thread she held into three, setting each at a different point around the original completed design. It was easier this time, not having to fight to control her emotions while she worked. The power burned paths through the new elements of the charm, tracing each line, meeting up again and splitting off to follow the more complicated pattern. When the whole was completed, Tris pulled the power lightly through the originally burned channels and connected them with a knot in the center. She pulled the focus away from the work, and returned the lava’s energy to the earth.

Looking up, Tris saw that Lecturer Glassmane was squinting at her through his spectacles. 

“What, in Lakik’s name, are you doing in my class?” He didn’t sound angry or upset.

Tris folded her hands in her lap. “Learning how to craft charms?” 

Lecturer Glassmane snorted, and took his spectacles off, tucking them into the pocket he’d abstracted them from originally. “I should kick you out of my classroom right now,” At Tris’ look of mild alarm, he assured her, “but I won’t. And not just because it would take too long to take the wards down and get them back up again." He sighed. “Top marks, well done. This is yours,” He prodded the wooden charm gingerly with one finger. “Be careful what you do with it, or you’ll be up to your elbows in alligators before you turn around. But I think whoever advised you on selecting classes made a serious mistake with this one.”

“Charm Crafting is a required class for first years,” Tris reminded him. 

“Eh, well… yes and no. Yes, it’s a matter of policy that all first years should learn the same curriculum, but no, it’s not, strictly speaking, a requirement that you sit every class. We don’t want you to be bored, here, after all. If you’re a more advanced student, you can test out of certain introductory classes by demonstrating that you already have a grasp of the material to be covered. Which you just did, by the way.” 

“Oh.” Tris frowned. “That’s all?”

Glassmane raised those eyebrows at her again. “What did you expect? 

Startled into honesty, Tris replied tartly, “I was expecting it to be more of a challenge.”

Dark eyes glittering intensely, the lecturer regarded his student shrewdly. “A challenge? What would you consider a challenge?”

Tris frowned thoughtfully. “That’s a good question. I think designing my own patterns would be a challenge. In this class we’ve only ever copied designs out of the books you've assigned. And I understand starting with the simple ones, but from what you’ve showed me here,” she tapped the drawing he’d made of the more complicated charm pattern, “it looks like there’s a vocabulary, of sorts. Different shapes make the magic move in different ways. And those shapes probably influence each other differently depending on positions and how they’re connected. I’d like to learn that. It would be more interesting to me than working the same pattern multiple times in different media. The charms we’ve made so far in class don’t seem to change much whether you work them in thread or metal or… well whatever, it’s drawing the magic into the right shape that does the work.”

Taking a deep breath in through his nose, Glassmane exhaled again slowly. “Thinking of specializing in charms, then, are you?”

Shaking her head, Tris met the lecturer’s eyes curiously. “Not particularly. Why do you ask?”

“What you describe, creating new charm patterns, that’s incredibly advanced work. And dangerous. These patterns are the basis for nearly all the work of the great mages. You can’t just shove two patterns together and make one new one out of them without a lot of careful thought and precision. Sometime there are unexpected side effects.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Do you know why I took my name Glassmane?”

He accepted her quiet head shake as encouragement to continue. “When I was a student, I thought that people weren’t taking me seriously enough. I was one of the younger candidates admitted to study here at that time. Maybe I was just too cute, I don’t know.” He smiled and winked at Tris. “But I thought that if I looked older, people would take me seriously. So what do you think I did?”

Tris simply lifted her eyebrows in encouragement to continue.

“I decided that if I had white hair, I would look older, more mature, yet also mysterious and quite like the powerful mage I was sure I was going to be. So I brewed up a potion. But I couldn’t find a recipe for a potion to make my hair white. I found potions to make my hair black as iron or yellow as corn, but nothing to make it white. So I improvised, and substituted for the main ingredient the fur of a northern ice bear. Are you familiar with northern ice bears?”

“I’ve seen drawings. They live in snowy landscapes and they’re all white, except for nose and paws, right? Seems like a good choice,” Tris opined. 

“Ah, but northern ice bears do not actually have white fur, as I later discovered. They have translucent fur. The reason they look so white in those pictures is because they are reflecting the color of the world around them, which in the middle of the tundra is white.” Glassmane made a face at his own folly. “So, I drank down this potion, and sent a note to this girl I liked, that she should meet me under the trees around the tower walk, because I had something I wanted to show her.”

“And?” Almost despite herself, Tris found she was interested in the outcome of his story.

Ruefully, Glassmane continued. “She took one look at me and started laughing. ‘Akatin! What have you done to your hair? It’s all green! You look like you’re covered in mold!’ Because, of course, it was high summer and my hair looked green from reflecting the leaves all around us.”

“And you named yourself after that accident?” Tris was amused, but not entirely sure what the moral of the story was.

“Yes, because it was the biggest mistake I think I had ever made. And in the process of dealing with the consequences of my error, I learned more in those few weeks than I had in all the classes I’d attended up to that point.”

Tris propped her chin on her hand and studied the lecturer. He wasn’t as old as she’d first thought. His hair did look a bit odd, she had to admit, but he had an engaging smile and something in his attention brought a flush to her cheeks. “So, what did you learn?” she inquired.

“I learned that just because you have a crush on someone, doesn’t mean they’re ever going to see you in the same way,” he smiled sadly, “and that if you’re going to make substitutions, you really need to do your research first. But I also learned that ice bears are fascinating, that light and color can interact in some very interesting ways, and that making a mistake isn’t the end of the world.”

Regarding the teacher thoughtfully, Tris said, “It almost sounds like you’re encouraging me to try creating my own charm patterns, despite the danger.”

“You might think so, but I couldn’t possibly advise you on a course that might require you to exercise your power outside the confines of this classroom.” Glassmane’s eyes twinkled hopefully. “By the way, did you know there are charms that are three dimensional patterns? Some patterns are designed in four dimensions, and only really work while they’re in motion.” He peered into Tris’ face appraisingly. “You don’t seem daunted by the idea.”

“Well, I have heard of three dimensional patterns for weaving magic, but four dimensional ones… that actually makes sense of something I’ve been puzzling over,” Tris admitted.

Laughing, Glassmane teased, “First you admit to a mistake, now you’re admitting something puzzles you. For a bit there I was afraid you never made mistakes and I would have nothing to teach you.”

Tris blushed.

“So, what has been puzzling you?” Glassmane prodded.

“I’ve been reading the collected papers of Ishabal Ladyhammer…”

Glassmane whistled softly. “Heady stuff for a first year. Do you have a list of people that need interesting curses applied to their backsides?”

“No,” Tris assured him. “I’m really more interested in curse-breaking.”

“Of course,” he replied with mock solemnity. “Why do the easy stuff?”

“But she talks about spinning a curse to activate it. I thought it was some sort of metaphor, but she literally means making the design rotate, doesn’t she? Is that what you meant by working in four dimensions?” 

Casually, Glassmane slid off his stool and leaned a hip on the table, shielding Tris partially from the rest of the classroom. “How about I make you a deal?”

Tris looked up at him shrewdly. “What kind of a deal?”

“How about I promote you to student assistant? You help me curb the enthusiasm of your more feckless classmates, and in return, you’re excused from having to prove to me that you know the easy stuff?” 

Calculatingly, Tris told him, “It sounds like dull work. I’d rather just sit through class and have the extra time at the end to read.”

Glassmane tugged thoughtfully on one of his earlobes. “I’ll teach you the advanced stuff when we have time, like this.” At Tris’ hard, unresponsive stare, “And I’ll get books for you that you wouldn’t be able to get on your own as a first year.” He looked away, examining his fingernails. “Did I mention I studied with Ishabal Ladyhammer?”

After a moment, just long enough to make him sweat, Tris agreed. “Deal.”

“Yes!” Glassmane hissed his triumph. “Grab your stuff. I'll need you sitting up here with me.”

As Tris collected her book bag from under the chair in the back of the classroom where she’d left it, she offered shrugs and apologetic glances to the other students who shared her table.

Lecturer Glassmane stalked between student work tables energetically. “Jellan? Hapgood? I see you both look nearly finished. The first one to bring their charm up to my workbench gets an extra point!”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lisse saw Ana was still inside, leaning against the tall workbench in the front of the room. The grinning lecturer loomed over her, his hand braced on the table beside her. He laughed at something Ana had said.

Lisse waited for Ana outside until the wards around the Charms class had been dispelled.She stood on tiptoe to peek in to the classroom, but her friend wasn’t in her usual seat.Frowning, Lisse watched for her in the stream of students exiting the class, worrying she was going to miss her in the crowd.But when the room had mostly emptied, Lisse saw Ana was still inside, leaning against the tall workbench in the front of the room.The grinning lecturer loomed over her, his hand braced on the table beside her.He laughed at something Ana had said.

“Ana!” Lisse called from the doorway.  “We’ve gotta go now if we’re want to have time to check each other’s runic exercises before lecture starts!”

Ana’s pale skin was tinged with an unmistakably rosy blush.  “Lisse!   Sorry!  Let me get my things.  I got a little distracted.”  As Ana gathered her belongings, the lecturer for the class bustled around her solicitously, handing her items she had forgotten.  He walked her to the door. 

“I’ll see you soon,” the tall lecturer promised quietly. 

Giggling, Ana reproved him.  “I just hope you don’t regret this.”  Lisse had seen Ana laugh before, but she had never seen her giggle. 

“Never.”  The lecturer shared a look with Ana that made Lisse feel like an intruder. 

Ana was smiling as she turned towards Lisse.  “Let’s go.”

Outside the lecture hall where Ancient Runes met, two other girls from their dorm stepped in close behind Lisse and Ana. 

"Sister Cheeseman has been holding out on us," the willowy young woman behind Lisse said archly.

"Sister Leh, I do believe you are correct," a broad shouldered woman of athletic build looming behind Ana agreed heartily.  Inserting her head between the pair, she directed a comment at Trisse.  “Sister Sherrit, has Sister Cheeseman taken you into her confidence?”

Lisse curvetted.  “No!  Sister Cheeseman has been quite remiss, Sister Wandon!”  She slapped Ana’s shoulder gently.  “What are they talking about, Ana?  What did you do?”

Ana frowned.

”Do you dispute the charge, Sister Cheeseman?" Sister Wandon could barely suppress her grin.

"What is the charge?"

Sister Leh spoke: "Sister Cheeseman was out very late last night."

"Mm-hmm…"  Sister Wandon added, "Sister Cheeseman did not return to her rooms at the customary hour, and was seen meddling with the lock and walking down the hall on tip toe so as not to disturb the floor matron."

"Furthermore," Sister Leh concluded, "A source close to the Sisterhood has noted that Sister Cheeseman was observed in intimate embrace with a person of the male variety shortly before returning to the hallowed precincts of our dormitory."  The muscular Sister Wandon’s room overlooked the most common approaches to the dormitory’s front entrance and she had already declared her specialization in vision magics. 

“I know who it is!” Lisse blurted before clapping both of her hands over her mouth. 

Leh Ting and Amell Wandon turned their attention to Lisse.  “If Sister Sherrit has information that would aid this investigation, she is bound by the sacred oath of sisterhood to share.”

Lisse could resist that plea for only so long.  “I don’t know for sure, but I think…” She sought Ana’s eyes apologetically.  “I saw Sister Cheeseman engaging in a flirtation with her Charms lecturer, just now.”

“Who do you have for Charmcraft?” Sister Wandon asked, the crease of a frown between her bushy eyebrows. 

Ana sighed.  “Glassmane,” she admitted reluctantly.

Sister Leh’s eyebrows rose, impressed.  “Glassmane?  Nice work!”

“Tall, dark and handsome,” Amell agreed approvingly.  “Yes, that sounds like the gentleman in question.” 

The two girls clapped Ana on the shoulders. 

“If you need any help pursuing your quarry, remember, the sisterhood is supporting you,” Ting told Ana.  “Our resources are at your disposal.”

Ana Cheeseman blinked, confusion giving way to a look of wonderment.  “I… thank you.”  After a pause she added, “…sisters.”

Ting and Amell split off inside the lecture hall to sit with a group of their other friends.  Ana and Lisse took their usual seats near the back.   

When Lisse handed her runic practice sheet to Ana to double check, Ana handed her a small wooden tablet with a charm branded onto the face.

“I’d like you to have this,” Ana insisted. 

“What is it?” Lisse asked, turning the piece of wood over to examine the smooth back of it.

“I made it in charms today,” Ana told her.  “Lecturer Glassmane was helping me with a mistake I’d made in the exercise, and… well, I’d like you to have it.  As a thank you.”

Lisse frowned.  “Thanking me for what?  I told the other girls about your thing with your charms teacher. You're not mad at me for that, are you? This isn’t going to curse me, is it?”

Laughing quietly, Ana insisted, “No, it’s for happiness.  I want you to be happy, too.”

Confused, Lisse shrugged philosophically.  Confusion was not a new feeling for her.  She snagged Ana’s runic practice sheet and checked the other girl’s work, cursorily.  Ana had beautiful penmanship.  Lisse always felt like a chaotic mess next to the self-possessed Ana.  She was just grateful that Ana always seemed willing to share her knowledge with the other girls in their dormitory.  Lisse just hoped someday she would find an opportunity to repay her for all her kindness.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was probably lack of sleep coupled with the stress of traveling, but Briar suddenly felt like he and Crane were wasting their time on a fool’s errand.

If Dedicate Crane was disappointed by the results of their first meeting with the Lightsbridge mind healers, he didn’t show it.Briar was frustrated, though.The healers kept asking him stupid questions about his teacher’s behavior, like: “is she short tempered?” Or “does she have mood swings?”Rosethorn was always a bit snappish.That wasn’t a symptom.That was just Rosethorn.If being occasionally short tempered was a sign that she was ill, then half the people Briar knew were too.

It was probably lack of sleep coupled with the stress of traveling, but Briar suddenly felt like he and Crane were wasting their time on a fool’s errand.

“Why did we come here again?” Briar grumbled to the yellow robed dedicate as they sat patiently on a hard bench outside the healer’s college waiting for their next appointment.  “They’re asking us all the same questions the healers back home at the Water Temple asked, except they’re not even bothering to tell us their speculations.”

Crane had his eyes closed.  He was leaning against the brick of the wall behind them, basking in the sun.  “Have a little patience, Briar.  They need to get their bearings first.  These are standard questions they ask of every case.  I’m hoping that once they establish the facts of the matter they’ll start asking more specific questions and someone will have some ideas about what to look for next.”

Maybe Crane was right.  They were here now.  If there was nothing they could do, they might as well bask like marigolds.  Briar closed his eyes as well and leaned back.  His face warmed in the sun, feeling as hot as Tris’ blush in his hand last night.  He shifted his seat on the uncomfortably hard bench.  What had caused her sudden loss of control?  That wasn’t like her.  She had worked so hard to gain mastery over her powers, and had, as far as anyone could tell, an unshakeable grip on the elements.  Briar was also worried about her plaintive self assessment that she might be cold and unlovable.  That was frustrating him too.  He felt helpless against her harsh self-judgement.  Nothing he had said had really seemed to convince her otherwise.  If anything, his words seemed to have broadened the distance between them. 

“Uhm… excuse me?  Mage Briar Moss?”

Briar opened his eyes.  A girl, so short as to be nearly eye level with him though she was standing and he was seated, bounced lightly on her toes in front of him.  Her complexion was as dark as Daja’s, but where Briar’s smith-mage sister was tall and solid, this girl was light boned and fidgety, almost like a bird.  She had dark corkscrew curls springing around her ears as she moved. 

“May I help you?” Briar asked.

“Oh!  Uh… well, that is, we met yesterday…?  After your lecture…?”  Her voice was high, almost shrill when it ascended at the end of her questioning remarks.  She reminded Briar of the baby starling Tris had rescued as a child.  Though, Briar considered as he sat up to appraise her, she was much more attractive than Shriek.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance again, Miss…?”

“Sherrit.  Lisse Sherrit.  Please, call me Lisse?”  Her grin was infectious. 

Grinning back at her Briar agreed.  “All right, Lisse.”

She giggled.

“How do you do, Miss Sherrit?”  Crane’s eyes were open, and he was extending his hand in greeting. 

“Oh?  Oh!  And Dedicate Crane!” She took his offered hand and curtseyed over it quickly.  “I almost didn’t see you there.”

“I know.  These robes blend in to the scenery so well,” Crane muttered dryly, waving his other hand to indicate the bright yellow and black garments he wore. 

Lisse giggled again, more nervously this time.  Dedicate Crane winced at the slightly higher pitch.“Well, I, er… I saw you here, uhm… resting?  And I wondered if, maybe, you needed anything?  Er, that is, is there anything I can get for you or… do for you?” Lisse offered, somewhat breathlessly.

“Thank you, Lisse,” Briar answered, feeling too hot and lazy to pursue a flirtation. “But no, we are being taken care of.”

“Oh.”  Lisse stopped bouncing.  “Well, okay, then.  See you around?”  She twiddled her fingers in a cute little wave and scampered away. 

When she was out of sight, Crane commented quietly, “She reminds me a bit of a squirrel.”

Briar chuckled.  “Do you remember the starling Tris rescued when we were kids?”

“No.  She rescued a starling?”

“Around the time the pirates attacked us.  We called the bird Shriek.”

It was Dedicate Crane’s turn to chuckle.  “Yes.  Very apt.”

A few minutes later they were called into the building again to meet with another healer. 

After another session of questions and answers with the healers that Briar judged fruitless, Crane called for a break.  “I do not travel as well as I used to, and I need to rest quietly for a little,” he excused himself to Briar.  “Will you be all right on your own?”

“I promised Tris I’d look for her when we were done with the healers,” Briar told the older dedicate.

Crane nodded.  “Well, we are not, strictly speaking, done with the healers.  But I believe we are done for today.  Give her my best.”  The two men walked in opposite directions.

Briar wandered vaguely in the direction of where he felt Tris to be.  He found a stall dispensing cold tea and fried snacks popular as a between-class refreshment and stopped there.  He bought a cup of the tea and found some shade beneath one of the large spreading trees nearby.  Finding Tris would be the easy part.  What he was going to say to her when he found her, he wasn’t so sure.  He’d promised her he’d help find a way to exercise her power while he was here, but he hadn’t come up with anything good yet.  He knew Tris would hate any magical exercise that felt like make-work.  She liked to be useful.  And anything too simple would bore her.  She liked puzzles and challenges and complicated workings.  By contrast, Briar liked to keep things simple.  Sow.  Water.  Harvest.  Then rest. 

Sitting on the ground with his back to the tree, Briar stretched out his magical senses.  The trees around him were all quite content.  The warm, dry weather that was stressing the smaller herbs and grasses did not bother the great trees, whose network of deep roots pulled moisture from far below the ground on which he sat.  The trees loved the heat of the bright midsummer sun.

Maybe it was that midday heat, or maybe it was the lack of sleep catching up to him, but Briar’s mouth suddenly felt dry.  He took another swallow of his cold tea, but it didn’t ease the parched feeling in his throat.

“Um… hi?”

Briar looked up, his heart pounding loudly in his ears.  It was that girl again.  “Lisse, wasn’t it?  What brings you here?”

The girl held a paper cone of the fried snacks from the stall nearby.  She gestured with the cone, nearly spilling its contents.  “Uh… I thought I’d get a snack.”  She held the cone out to Briar.  “Want some?”

Briar shook his head, suddenly struck dumb by a surge of heat flushing his face and making his ears ring.

The girl had settled herself tailor fashion on the ground in front of him, and was peering into his face questioningly.  “Do you feel it too?”

He shook his head, but it wasn’t denial.  “What is it?”

Lisse nodded sagely.  “Fate.”  She took one of the small tidbits from her paper cone and crunched it. 

The tree behind Briar pulled more cool moisture into its roots from the deep earth, and shuddered slightly. _Cataclysm._   Briar got the impression of lava, hot rocks melting in caverns, plants withering as underground vents spewed poison gas.

“Are you…?” Briar croaked, then gulped the last mouthful of the cold tea.  “Are you an ambient mage?” He asked in a more normal voice.

Giggling, Lisse shook her head.  “But you are!  Ambient, I mean.  I heard someone mention it at the lecture yesterday.”  She cocked her head to one side, just like a bird, and asked, “What’s it like, being able to understand plants?” 

Briar had a stock answer for this question.  “I don’t know.  What’s it like not being able to understand plants?”  It bought him time to focus on these sensations he was fairly certain weren’t his own. 

Nodding, Lisse crunched another of her snacks.  “Good point.” 

Briar stood.  “Would you like to walk a little bit?  I think we’re making this tree nervous.”  If the trees were feeling uncomfortable, maybe a little distance from them would allow Briar to regain his calm.  If the cause was something else, maybe the air would cool him off.

Lisse giggled.  “Whatever you say, green mage.”

After Briar returned the empty tea cup to the stall, the pair strolled through leaf-dappled sunlight.  Birdsong, the footfalls of other pedestrians and Lisse’s occasional crunchings seemed distracting enough to inhibit any easy conversation.  Rather than cooling him, the breeze seemed to stoke the burning feeling within Briar.  “Do you have somewhere you have to be?” he asked abruptly. 

Shrugging, Lisse spilled a few of her snacks.  A nearby bird hopped over to investigate.  “I’ve got a study group I should be at, but Ana will understand if I don’t show.”

“Ana?” Briar asked.

Smiling at him, Lisse popped another snack into her mouth and crunched.  “Ana is my dorm sister.  She’s amazing!  She’s the reason I got to see your talk yesterday.  I’m only a first year,” she told him apologetically, “and your lecture was only supposed to be for the advanced students.  I don’t quite understand how she managed it, but Ana snuck us in by having us help some old professor carry stuff.  And they just let us stay!”

“Did she now?  Is Ana a first year too?”

“Yes!  But she’s really clever,” Lisse insisted.  “It was her idea to start a study group for those of us having trouble with our class in Ancient Runes.  Not that Ana has trouble with it, generally, but I think she was tired of having us all ask her the same questions individually.  Now we just all meet once a week in the afternoon after our runic lecture and we practice our inscriptions and just sort of help each other out.  It’s lots of fun!”

“Is it?  Well, then you shouldn’t be missing it,” Briar coaxed.  “Why don’t I walk you there?” He offered with a smile he hoped didn’t look too feverish. 

“Only if you come in and say hi to the girls, okay?” Lisse insisted.  She shoved the crumpled paper cone of leftover snacks in her bag and grabbed Briar’s hand.  “They all wanted to meet you when I told them about you yesterday.” 

Paradoxically it seemed to Briar, Lisse warm hand in his own seemed to cool the building heat.  He felt much more comfortable as she pulled him alongside her.  Instead of leading him to the dorm building as Briar expected, he found himself in the great Lightsbridge Library, moving too fast through the building to really appreciate its grandeur.  The book loving part of himself whined in frustration as he was hustled past stacks that promised rare herbal manuscripts, scrolls of medicinal recipes and other delights.  Lisse stopped in front of one of the many nondescript doors set along the wall of the main study area and knocked. 

The door opened and Briar was pulled into a maelstrom of sound.  Seven other girls were crowded around a rectangular table almost too large for the tiny space.  Their voices bounced around the room before hitting Briar in the face. 

“Everybody?” Lisse’s shrill voice was louder than the the rest of them combined.  “I want you to meet Briar.  He’s my new boyfriend.”

The noise level dropped slightly, and then rose again.  A haughty looking blonde girl spared a glance for Lisse.  “Another one?  That’s no excuse to be late.”  She handed a sheet of paper to the newcomer.  “Sit down already and tell me if you can figure out how I’m supposed to fix this.  The only thing Professor Gemcracker said was that it was wrong and I needed to do it again.”

Pouting, Lisse accepted the sheet and dropped into a chair next to the blonde, her bag in her lap. 

Without the smaller girl’s hand in his own, Briar was again overwhelmed by the feeling of heat uncoiling low in his belly and spreading through his limbs.  In addition to Lisse and the haughty blonde, the room contained two girls who looked to be twins, one who wore her straight black hair very long, the other who had it cut very short so that it could never fall into her eyes; a tall, broad shouldered girl of medium dark coloring whose long horsetail frizzed out behind her; a buxom girl with wavy chestnut brown hair; an olive skinned young woman with a mass of dark curls pinned messily to the back of her head, and at the other end of the room, her hair wrapped in a thick veil of a deep blue color that flattered her pale skin and eyebrows, sat Tris.

“Is it hot in here, or is it just me?” Briar asked.

Tris looked up from the paper she was scanning.  “If you’re going to stay, close the door and take a seat.”

Briar closed the door behind him and took an unoccupied chair.  He knew he should probably just go, but he was feeling dizzy.  He braced his elbows on the table in front of him and leaned forward slightly, hoping the feeling would pass quickly.  Maybe it had been something in the tea?  The women were busy exchanging papers, making comments on each others’ work and dipping their pens into one or the other of the two communal ink pots set on either end of the table to take notes or make corrections.  Though all the women at the table were distinct individuals, they all wore similar familiar expressions.  They all reminded Briar of Tris when she was concentrating on something.

The girl with the frizzy horsetail was watching Briar curiously.  “What’s going on with your hands?”

Briar looked down at his hands.  The vining tattoos that writhed and blossomed up his hands and arms were wilting.  The flowers were dropping their petals, leaves curling in on themselves. 

At almost the same moment, Tris’s long nose twitched.  She sat up sharply.  “I smell something burning.  Does anybody else smell that?”

The girls all quieted to sniff the air, but the hush didn’t last long.  Lisse yelped loudly, springing from her seat to dump her book bag into the middle of the table.  The bag, a cheap cloth carry sack, split open.  The crumpled cone that held the rest of Lisse’s fried snacks caught fire, a hungry flame licking up the oily paper.

Tris and Briar both slammed wards around the fire, meeting halfway and combining their power easily through long practice.  Tris stood, “Amell, run, get the librarian.  Elphie, Bambim, fire fighting blankets.”

The girl with the frizzy horsetail, the one with the very short hair and the haughty blonde all shoved their chairs back and raced out of the room without getting in each others’ way.

Tris met Briar’s eyes. _Hold it for me?_   Briar nodded.  Tris passed control of the magical enclosure to him, then reached inside it and did something with the air that seemed to starve the fire.  The single flame dwindled.  None of the other papers caught.  The fire died, a ghost of smoke rising up from where it had been extinguished. 

The librarian arrived first, unmistakable in the robes of her office.  “What happened?”  The librarian sniffed the air, coughed, then waded through the room to open the single window. 

“It wasn’t my fault!” Lisse blurted.  “I didn’t do anything.  My bag just suddenly got hot and then it was on fire!”

The other two girls returned carrying the heavy blankets used to smother small fires.  Briar could see the designs woven into them that would also make them useful if they had to contain magic or certain kinds of poisons.  It seemed like a useful addition to fire fighting in a library that catered to mages and books of magic. 

“Well, it’s not on fire now,” the girl with the messily pinned curls observed. 

The librarian hummed speculatively.  “Well, if the two of you outside would come in here and stand by with those blankets, I think you can take those wards down.”  She nodded at Briar.

Carefully, Briar dismantled the wards, taking the combined magics into himself without disturbing the mess on the table.  Tris’ power blended familiarly with his own, finding space in the gaps between, like raindrops soaking into gravel.  The breeze coming in through the window scoured the air of smoke, rustling the charred edges of the stacked papers.  Briar blinked grit out of his stinging eyes.

The librarian clapped Briar on the shoulder familiarly.  “You have your class well trained.  They were very calm in the crisis and did exactly as they ought.  Good work.”

“They aren’t my class…” Briar objected.

“We’ll get this cleaned up before we go,” Tris assured the librarian, with a warning glance at Briar. 

“There are rags and dust bins in the closet at the end of the hall,” the librarian said over her shoulder as she left the room.

The girl with the messy curls tagged Lisse, and the pair went out, presumably in search of cleaning supplies. 

“Are you okay?” Tris asked, watching Briar with concern. 

“I think so.”  He looked down at his arms.  What was once green and colorfully vibrant was now faded, skeletons of leaves and dried seed pods outlined in brown against the brown skin of his arms.  His knees felt as brittle and fragile as the dead leaves he now sported.  He sat with a thump. “Or, I will be, I’m sure.”  He swallowed with difficulty.

The tall girl, Amell, had also gone to fetch water.  She had a small basin of it that she put on the table, and a cup she handed to Briar with a sympathetic look.  He gulped it gratefully.  It seemed to help. 


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dedicate Crane had hoped a nap would erase the nagging ache behind his eyes, but when he recognized the building where Professor Nepeta’s office was located, he detoured, hoping the other mage would be in his office. He was.

Dedicate Crane had hoped a nap would erase the nagging ache behind his eyes, but when he recognized the building where Professor Nepeta’s office was located, he detoured, hoping the other mage would be in his office.He was.

“Dedicate Crane!  What a surprise to see you again…” Nepeta jumped up to lift a stack of papers from his spare chair.  He turned in place slowly, looking in vain for another resting spot for the papers.  “…so soon.”

“I was just passing by,” Crane insisted, relieving Nepeta of his stack of papers to return them to the chair they’d come from.  “I hope it’s not too inconvenient, but could I trouble you for another look at that ceiling of yours?”

“Oh?! Uh… Yes, I suppose!” Nepeta edged awkwardly back, gesturing for the yellow robed dedicate to precede him. 

In contrast to the chaos of papers and books in the front half of the room, Crane noted approvingly how well tended and neat Nepeta kept his specimens.  He saw not a stray crumb of potting medium, not a stray drop of water, just shelves of immaculate pots and contented plants.  Dedicate Crane stood in the tinted light and stretched out his senses.  In addition to the well cared for plant specimens on the shelves, he felt the growing pleasure of plants above him, warm in the sun reflected off the sky window.  He expected drying grasses or drought tolerant planting given the summer’s habitually hot weather and the rocky soil of the area.  Instead, his mind touched tender mosses, masses of ferns, a riot of mints.

He frowned.  Looking up at the semi-opaque window revealed no answers, but the light shining down seemed to soothe Crane’s headache.

“What are you looking for?” Nepeta asked quietly.

“I don’t know, but I hope I recognize it when I see it,” Crane answered, just as quietly.

The two men stood for a while in silence, faces upturned to the light.

“As a child I was told,” Dedicate Crane spoke, but Nepeta did not move, “that before we are born, the gods come to us and offer us gifts.  We cannot take them all. We must choose one or two, or maybe three particular things that we will come in to this world with.  That is why, although babies must learn to talk and walk and be a part of their human families, there are elements of their personality they are just born with, parts of them that were their gifts from the gods they should be encouraged to follow as they grow.”

“Did you believe that?” Nepeta asked.

“Yes, absolutely.  And growing up I was so proud of how well I’d chosen.  I came into this world with a sharp intellect and an ambient magical talent for working with plants.  I have created medicines that heal plagues, improved common remedies with my studies and I have taught others to do so as well.  I believed I was diligent in following the path Asaia Bird-Winged had laid out for me.”  Crane looked down at the racks of plants in front of him.  “But now I am having a crisis of faith.”

“How so?” Nepeta asked.

“The gods mock my pride.  I have healed hundreds, maybe even thousands of people with the work I have done.  But I am helpless to find a cure for the people closest to me.”  Dedicate Crane turned to see Professor Nepeta watching him solemnly.  “These days I think perhaps I would have done better to choose gifts of healing and a kind heart so I could follow Yanna Healtouch more closely.”

“I don’t think we get to choose our gifts,” Nepeta frowned slightly.  “I wonder so often what my life would be like if I weren’t so different from other people.  But whatever your gifts were, it sounds like you did choose Yanna’s path.  Healing, I mean.  That’s what making medicines is all about, right?”

“But I didn’t choose Yanna’s gift,” Crane stressed.  “If I had, maybe I could just reach out my hand and heal my friends instead of waiting for other people to figure out how to solve their problem.  But this creeping illness is so far outside my area of knowledge.  Each time I try to offer a solution, it is cut off as being impractical, ineffective, useless.  I feel like I’m being pruned of all I could offer them, twig by twig.  All I have left is my worry and my concern.”

Professor Nepeta looked away, drew close to his plants and gently brushed one of the tiny leaves.  The scent of lavender bloomed and filled the room.  It was calming, soothing.  “Maybe the gods are pruning you back so you can grow more vigorously?”

Crane smiled faintly.  “Spoken like a true green mage.”

“Oh, I’m not a plant mage.”  Nepeta sounded surprised, but not displeased.  “I’m an academic mage.  I just work with plants because I like them.”

“Is that so?” Crane asked.  “So, how often do you work with the plants that grow on the other side of that?”  He pointed up to the translucent ceiling. 

Nepeta frowned.  “The other side?”

“Up top?  At ground level?  I sense some interesting things growing against the side of the building, right up against where this window sits,” Crane insisted. 

Nepeta tilted his head to one side.  “I suppose there must be, but I’ve never gone up there to look.”

“Do you mind if I do?” Dedicate Crane asked.

“No, not at all,” Nepeta assured him. 

“Well then, I thank you for your time, Professor Nepeta.”  Crane smiled, feeling somewhat better.    “And thank you for the lavender.  It really is amazing how potent your plants are.”

Nepeta stammered his thanks, and saw Dedicate Crane out of his office. 

Crane had to take a slightly circuitous route to reach the place where Professor Nepeta’s translucent ceiling emerged from the foundations of the large building, but he found it eventually.  There was no proper walkway beside it.  Sloping stone foundations supported the extension to basement roof.  A strip of rocky dirt separated those foundations from a brick wall that enclosed the space on two sides.  The only nominally open side of the enclosure was partially blocked by a large deciduous tree.  Fortunately, Crane was not a corpulent man and the tree was willing to move branches aside to let him pass. 

Standing in this sheltered space, Crane was touched by something he had not felt in a long time.  He wiped his eyes gently on one sleeve of his robe. Approaching the shallow inclination of the basement roof on hands and knees, the aroma of crushed mint rose to perfume the moist air around him.  Moss clung to every hollow and groove in the stone framework. 

Looking down through the ceiling from above, Dedicate Crane could not see into Nepeta’s office any more than he could see through stone.  The panels contained bubbles and wavy lines in a pattern that repeated irregularly, shaping the way the light moved and completely obscuring any clear vision.  Peering closely, Crane saw even finer detail work.  Small lacy designs, like the tiny swimming creatures you might see in sea water if you had the right vision spells, were imbedded erratically in the waves and around the bubbles. 

He stared at the piece, trying to memorize each little detail, before giving it up as futile.  This was a fascinating working, but far too complicated to replicate in his own greenhouse at Winding Circle.  At least, not by himself.  He would need a team of glassblowers… glass mages, at that.  He would need experts in runic languages to note each of the small designs worked between the layers and charm crafters to figure out what they did and how to imbed them as they were between bubbles and waves.  He’d have to figure out if there was a pattern to the rippling irregularities, and what they contributed to the effect.  Reproducing even this small section of glass would be the work of a lifetime, of several lifetimes.  And, even more maddeningly, Dedicate Crane still wasn’t entirely sure what it did.  He just had the unshakable conviction that if he could bring Rosethorn to stand in the light that filtered through this amazing creation, maybe, just maybe, she would recover enough of her senses so that they could simply ask her what was wrong.  Briar’s condition was less advanced, and he seemed to be less aware that he was ill, but maybe exposing him to this window would be a good supplement to the work the healers were trying to do with him.  It couldn’t hurt. 

Wondering if he was going mad as well, Crane backed away from this most unusual window and brushed his knees.  At least his headache was gone.  But the afternoon was getting late, and he wanted to take notes on what he had seen here while it was still fresh in his mind.

Returning to the house of his former classmates, Crane was stopped by the sight of a moss garden in the front yard of one of their neighbors.  The small patch was lush with varying greens from bright emerald to nearly black, incorporating stones and a few well coordinating taller shrubs for aesthetic variation.  Compared to the drying summer gardens around it, the moss garden looked as if it had been transplanted from an entirely different climate, one of cool mists and gentle rains, and had not yet realized it was unlikely to flourish here.  It seemed as out of place as the moss around Nepeta’s window. 

The door to the house creaked as it opened and shut with a bang.  “Dedicate Crane!  I thought I saw you through the window!”  Dita Batnose leaned over the rail of the raised porch fronting the house.  “How are you?  How goes the work with the healers?”

“Slowly,” Dedicate Crane admitted.  “They are right to be careful about a diagnosis at long distance but…”

“It sounds frustrating,” Dita sympathized. 

“Mmm.”  Crane admitted.  “By the way, is this moss garden your work?” He asked.

Dita Batnose grinned and skipped down the steps, two at a time.  “It is.  Your colleague was also fascinated by it.  But I suppose that’s understandable given he took Moss as his mage name.”

Crane did not bother to correct the woman’s misunderstanding of how Briar Moss came to be called so.  Instead, he asked curiously, “How do you keep it from drying out? I wouldn’t think this climate was at all friendly to this sort of planting.”

“It’s not easy!” Dita agreed.  “I cache rain water in barrels and water it frequently.  We had a terrible heat wave late last summer and I was a little worried for its survival.  Fortunately, moss doesn’t mind drying out as much as herbs do.  You can find a patch of moss that looks dried out and dead, but you just wet it again and it springs back to life.  And even when it doesn’t, spores are hardy little things.  They’re so much easier to germinate than seeds.”  Dita smiled sideways at the lanky dedicate.  “At least I find them to be so.”

Dedicate Crane tapped his lips thoughtfully with one finger.  “So, water is the key?”

Dita nodded.  “It’s crucial for this sort of luxurious growth.  But isn’t that true for all living things?” She added philosophically.

“What about desert plants?” Crane argued.  “Keep them too wet and they’ll die just as surely.”

“But they need some water,” Batnose countered.  “They are generally built to withstand drought and take advantage of monsoon conditions.  Though they don’t want constant water, they do need the inundation of the rainy season to propel their growth over the year.”

“So, perhaps we can think of water like a medicine?  It must be given in the proper dosage.  Not enough and it is ineffective.  Too much and it is toxic.  And each individual has their own tolerances.”  Crane smiled at his own analogy.

Batnose grimaced.  “You’ve been talking to Nepeta again, haven’t you?”

Surprised, Crane admitted, “Yes, but we didn’t talk about water.”

It was Batnose’s turn to be surprised.  “What did you talk about?”

“Gods,” was Crane’s answer.  He pondered that for a moment.  “Thank you, Batnose.  You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

“Don’t forget you have a lecture scheduled tomorrow,” was her reply as she returned to her house. 


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the other girls had left, Briar remained sitting across from Tris, the wooden charm on the large library table between them.

When the other girls had left, Briar remained sitting across from Tris, the wooden charm on the large library table between them.Lisse had returned the gift eagerly, once they had determined that it had been the cause of the unexpected blaze. 

“What is it supposed to be?”  Briar asked thickly, his mouth still feeling dry.

“Happiness,” Tris said glumly, “in romance.”

Briar regarded the item apprehensively.  “I suppose your friend Lisse seemed happy enough before her homework caught on fire.  She said meeting me was fate.”

“Her fate brings her several romances a week,” Tris scoffed.  “She’s a lot like you in that really.  I thought the two of you would hit it off better.” 

He didn’t dignify this comment with a response.  “So, is it doing this to me?”  He regarded the quiescent brown markings on his arms. 

“It seems likely.  I used lava for the power source.”  Tris frowned unhappily.  “And burned it onto that beech wood shape.  Your sympathy with plants probably means you aren’t enjoying that sensation at all.  I am so very sorry.”

“Well, I’m sorry I doubted that you had people to talk to.  You seem to have quite a squadron of supporters.  Those girls seem convinced you can solve anything.  They practically threw me at you thinking you could fix whatever's going on here.”  Briar watched Tris as she stared at the charm.  “Do you solve many problems for them?”

She responded distractedly.  “I mostly just listen.  They tend to solve their own problems if I ask the right questions.”  Finally, Tris shook her head.  “I’m afraid if I just destroy this thing there will be backlash.  I had a bit of an accident creating it, and used a lot more power than I probably should have.”

“If it’s so powerful, why isn’t it affecting you?” Briar asked.

“It is,” Tris said shortly.

It was Briar’s turn to frown.  “But you like lava.”

“Oh, yes,” Tris agreed, her expression shadowed.  “I like it very much.  And I’m feeling quite…” she paused, staring at a spot on the table right in front of her for a long moment.  “…happy,” she concluded softly.  “And I shouldn’t be.”

“Why shouldn’t you be happy?”

Looking up at Briar, Tris confided, “I think I accidentally captivated my charms lecturer while making this.  He offered to make me his assistant for the class.  He asked my opinion on the other students’ work.  We had a wonderful conversation about magic theory and crafting.  But I’m afraid he’ll have come to his senses by the next time our class meets and he’ll tell me he changed his mind.”  Tris shook her head as if to clear it.  “I think the magic made him believe I was something special that I’m not.  The feeling will fade and then he’ll be apologetic and it will be awkward.”  She picked the charm off the table.  “Now, I just have to figure out how to destroy this without setting everything on fire.” 

Briar reached across the table to stop her, his hand gripping the hold she had on the charm.  “No.  I’m uncomfortable, but I only noticed it when Lisse came near me.”  He corrected himself, “Or rather, when I’ve been near the charm.  I was fine today, otherwise.  If it makes you happy, it is a good thing.  You deserve to be happy.  If I just keep my distance from it, I should be fine.”

“No, that’s stupid, Briar.”  Tris pulled out of his grip.  “I don’t want happiness like this.  It’s a trick.  It’s a cheat.  It’s like pulling the rain to where I am and disrupting weather patterns everywhere else.  Didn’t you say that anyone worthy of me would like me, prickles and all, just the way I am?”  She glared at Briar.  “How can I be sure if someone likes me, or if their better sense is being overwhelmed by this thing?  If this charm is the only reason Glassmane likes me, I don’t want him to like me!” 

“Whoa, Coppercurls,” Briar shrank back slightly.  “You don’t have to yell at me!  I get your point.”

“Besides, if this is supposed to be my happiness,” Tris brandished the charm, “and you’re avoiding it, you’re also avoiding me.”  She finished plaintively, “do you want to avoid me?”

“Well, I just figured with you in Karang now, and me in Emelan, we’ve been avoiding each other a lot lately.”  Absently, he massaged the hand he had touched her with.  “It certainly won’t bother me once Crane and I leave Lightsbridge.  I can bear it for a week or so.”

Tris stared at him horrified.  “Briar, what are you doing?”

Briar looked down to see the skin on his hand where he’d rubbed it was unmarked, the dried leaves crumbling away under the pressure of his touch.  As if he’d started a chain reaction, the remaining leaves and vines inscribed on his skin disintegrated.  Even the dried seed pods burst and came apart, scattering black dots like freckles where greenery used to flourish.

Crying out angrily, “I can’t do anything without hurting someone, can I?!” Tris shook the wooden charm violently and Briar felt more than heard a pop, like a cork coming abruptly unstuck from the neck of a bottle.  The design on the charm writhed and opened from the center like a flower blossoming.  Fire chased each charred petal, and in a moment Tris held a thin wooden rind with a large, gently smoking hole punched through it. 

“Huh,” Briar said.  The tension in his gut evaporated, and he suddenly felt like he could breathe again.  As the heat drained from him, Briar felt icy cold anger flood in to replace it.  “What did you go and do that for?!”

“It was hurting you!” Tris insisted, gripping the remains of the charm tightly. 

“Not much!  And now we’ll never know what it was doing to me, with it like that,” Briar stood and gestured furiously at the smoking rind in Tris’ hands.

“Well, I don’t even know what I did!  Maybe it wasn’t me at all!”  Angry red blotches marked her face, and tears sparkled in the corners of her eyes.

Now a muddy feeling of shame swamped over the icy anger.  Briar looked down at the table.  Tris had just been trying to help.  He looked at his hands.  They looked naked without their usual riot of greenery.  At least the two x marks in the webs between each thumb and forefinger had vanished along with the rest.  “What am I going to do about these?” He whined plaintively, lifting his bare hands up for Tris to inspect. 

Tris glared at Briar coldly.  “You told me they didn’t hurt.”

Briar moped.  “I’m just used to seeing them… alive.  I thought those tattoos were a part of me now and they’ve just vanished.  I feel like I’ve taken off all my clothes in front of you. I feel so naked!  How are people supposed to know I’m me if my tattoos just disappear like that?”

Tris flushed again, this time looking less angry.  “Well, excuse me, Mage Moss.  Not all of us feel the need to advertise who we are by drawing our magic all over our skin.”

Briar felt emotionally unbalanced, his mood swinging wildly out of depression now into less familiar territory.  Unsettled and having no other target for his unease, he directed his emotional outburst at the girl in front of him.  “No.  Some of us would rather change our name and run away from home because we don’t know how to talk to people without bossing them around!” 

“I’m not running way!  And it’s talking to people too much that got me into this mess!” Tris spat.  “I shouldn’t have told you anything if you were just going to use it to make fun of me.  I knew leaving you was the right choice.”

Briar’s eyebrows shot up.  “Me?  Leaving me?  Not leaving Daja or Sandry or the Duke or Lark?  You weren’t leaving Rosethorn?  You weren’t leaving Glaki or Little Bear or Chime?  Just me?”

“You don’t understand.”

“No.  I don’t.”  Briar tucked his naked hands under his armpits.  “And I don’t know if I want to.”  He stalked out of the room, knowing he was probably being stupid, and not quite able to stop himself from making the mistake.     


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rosethorn peered at Briar. She was upside down, relative to him. “You look like you’ve been through the wars.”

Rosethorn peered at Briar.She was upside down, relative to him.“You look like you’ve been through the wars.”

Briar’s head was hanging off the edge of the narrow bed in the room he’d used when he stayed at Discipline Cottage when he was younger.  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

It was far more difficult than it should have been to move himself around in the bed.  He seemed to be sharing it with several snakes made of bone hinged together vertebrae by vertebrae.  He finally succeeded in propping himself up against the head of the bed, only by evicting one of the snakes from its position and pulling it into his lap.  He pet the gleaming snake’s skull like he might pet a lap cat.  “I was stupid.  I know I was stupid.  I’m regretting it and I can’t go make it right because I’m stupidly asleep right now.”

“You’re touching them with both hands now,” Rosethorn observed.  “Move,” she told one of the remaining snakes.  It slithered down the foot of the bed and curled up around one of the supports.  Rosethorn wedged her hip against Briar’s calves to sit on the bed with him.  “In fact, it feels like you’re all here.  So whatever you did today had an effect.”

Thrusting his arms at Rosethorn, Briar demanded, “What do you see?”

“Your arms?” Rosethorn supplied with a humoring expression. 

“Okay.  What don’t you see?” he asked pointedly.

With a sigh, Rosethorn took hold of Briar’s arm, supporting his elbow in one hand, his wrist with the other.  She scanned his forearm closely.  She met Briar’s eyes questioningly.

“My tattoos?” Briar supplied.  “You know, the leaves and flowers and vines that crawl up and down my arms because I used Sandy’s needles and my own plant dyes when decorating myself?  They’re gone.”

Shaking her head in negation, “No, they’re still there.  Look.”  She plucked one of the dots off his skin.  “See?  You’ve just gone to seed.  The next time it rains everything will sprout fresh and green again.”  She peered at the dot for a long moment before addressing the corner of the room.  “Luvo, is this a seed I should be familiar with?”

The mountain god, whom Briar’s student Evvy had nicknamed Luvo, trundled out of the darkness.  “I do not know Dedicate Rosethorn.  What seeds should you be familiar with?”

“Gods,” Rosethorn rolled her eyes.  “Never mind, Luvo.  Briar will just have to figure out what to do with them after they sprout.”

“Rosethorn?” Briar leaned forward slightly to catch her eye.  She still held the seed she’d gleaned from his arm.  “You keep telling me this place has something to do with Gyongxe.  Evvy was with us in Gyonxe.  Why isn’t she here with us now?”

Luvo spoke.  “I did not consider it useful for Evumeimei Dingzai to forget meeting me, or the time we spent together.  I keep the gods from disturbing her sleep.”

“Huh.  Why can’t I seem to fall asleep here then?” Rosethorn asked Luvo.  “If you can keep the gods away from Evvy…?” 

“You have been blessed, Dedicate Rosethorn.” Luvo said simply.  “As was your student Briar Moss.  You were never intended to wake inside the dream.  That you have done so is perplexing to me, so I keep you company and watch.”

Briar frowned.  “Can we be un-blessed?  If it would allow Rosethorn to sleep properly and regain her senses again in our world?”

“Such a thing is certainly possible,” Luvo admitted.  “But I selfishly kept Evumeimei from the blessing.  I did not think of shielding either of you from it.  And I do not know how to undo what has been done.”  Luvo paused, his stillness profound.  “It is possible I made a mistake.”

Rosethorn sighed.  “Well, what’s done is done.”  She licked the small dark dot between her fingers and stuck it in the middle of Briar’s chest.  It clung.  “You really should start wearing more than nothing to bed.  One of these days you’re going to put me to the blush.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was mid-morning before Tris managed to track Lecturer Glassmane down, or rather, up.

She’d had an early history lecture to attend, so it was mid-morning before Tris managed to track Lecturer Glassmane down, or rather, up.He was supposed to be in his office, according to the sign he had posted on the door, but there was no response to her knock, and the breeze coming out from under the door showed her the room was empty. 

Tris opened her sight to the breezes in the building, hoping she would find him nearby.  She saw nothing out of the ordinary, until she heard someone on a breeze coming through the middle of a blank wall.  She found an illusion, charmed to look like brick and mortar, concealing an open doorway and stairs leading up.  Tris followed them to the roof.  The building’s top was flat, with low walls around the perimeter.  Drainage channels were cut into the wall at intervals to let rain water out.  It may have been designed as a rooftop garden, but now it was empty, except for Lecturer Glassmane sitting next to the low perimeter wall.  His elbows were propped on the top of the wall before him, chin in his hands as he gazed through a pair of thick spectacles out over the university.

Glassmane didn’t turn at the sound of approaching footsteps, but he patted the place next to him. 

“It’s nice up here,” Tris commented.  She’d rather stand, but she didn’t want to loom over the man while having a conversation and it was easier in the shelter of the wall to filter out the sounds and images. The breeze wanted to skate over the top of the building. 

“What brings you here, Cheeseman?” 

Tris removed her spectacles.  She followed his gaze and changed the curvature of the lenses in her eyes so she might see what he was staring at so intently.  There was a game going on: two groups of students, a large ball, some sort of running back and forth between trees.  “I’ve got some questions for you.  I thought these were your office hours.”

“Nobody comes to office hours in the middle of term, Cheeseman.  Students come the first two weeks, right before exams and right after exams.”

“Not during exams?”

“I never hold office hours during exams.  I’m too busy grading.”

The game had turned into a fight, which was being broken up by a stern looking matron in an outlandish hat.  Lecturer Glassmane sighed and turned his attention away from the ball pitch.  He removed his spectacles and set them on top of the low wall.  Tris blinked her far vision away and returned her spectacles to her face before pulling the charred rind of wood from her bag.  She’d wrapped it in paper so as not to smudge soot over everything.  When she unwrapped the parcel, she had Glassmane’s entire attention.

“Sweet!  That is an epic failure mode, right there.”  He gestured to the burnt husk of the charm she’d created the day before.  “May I?”

Tris nodded and he picked the thing up.  “Did you know that would happen?” she asked him accusingly.

“Not at all.  I thought I wouldn’t see you until next week, crying over all the hearts you’d broken and begging me to help you destroy it.  I wasn’t going to help until you gave me the tally.  The current high score for a charm of this type is two proposals of marriage, five indecent propositions and a dozen bouquets.  Can you top that?”

“No.  Not even one broken heart.”

Glassmane favored her with a look.  “Are you sure about that?”

Tris frowned at him.  “Let me ask you first: do you still want me as your assistant?”

“Having second thoughts, Cheeseman?”

“No.  It just occurred to me, afterward, that you might have asked me to help you with the class because of… certain feelings…?”

“You think I don’t recognize the effects of my own charm?” Glassmane laughed quite freely.  “Oh, I’ll admit, you put more power into it than I’ve felt for a long time, and it was quite pleasant to feel that way again after so long, but it had nothing to do with offering you the assistantship.” 

Tris regarded the lecturer dubiously.  “If you’re sure…”

“Miss Cheeseman, romance is quite delightful.  I highly recommend it.  It’s why this charm is still on the curriculum.”  He brandished the shape with a gleam in his eye.  “Burning romance will keep you warm at night.”  Glassmane grinned at the charred wood meaningfully.  “But without real sympathy or emotional connection, it exhausts itself quickly.  Sure, you put enough juice into it that we may have relaxed our internal censors a little more than we intended to yesterday, but it didn’t change who we are inside.  That charm didn’t suddenly supply you with incredibly insightful questions, it didn’t retroactively sharpen your incredible magical control, and it didn’t solve my little puzzle challenge for you.  And those are the things that made me think you’d be an admirable assistant.” 

“Fine,” Tris accepted this and moved on.  “What I want to know now is why did this happen?”

“I can’t know for sure.  I wasn’t there.  But there are a couple of things that might have happened.  You tell me…?”

Tris related everything she considered relevant, from handing the charm to Lisse, to the fire in the study room, eliding certain details about the fight with Briar, but ending with the charm’s disintegration.

Glassmane snorted.  “No broken hearts, my foot!  A fight with your boyfriend?  That’s more like what I expected!  Get the chests heaving, the face blushing, next thing you know…!”

“It’s not like that,” Tris said coldly. 

“If you say so,” the lecturer agreed dubiously.  “But it sounds like you destroyed the charm yourself.”

Tris was focused again.  “How?  What did I do?  And can I do it again?”

Glassmane sighed and peeked through his thick spectacles at the action down below.  “Fine.”  He folded the spectacles again and returned them to the top of the wall.  He sat, his back supported by the roof’s enclosure.  “Welcome to Intermediate Charms.  I am Lecturer Glassmane, and today I am going to tell you about the three most common charm shapes.”

Tris resettled herself more comfortably and pushed her spectacles back up her long nose.  “Circle, square and triangle.”

“Who’s teaching this class, you or me?” Glassmane squinted at her with mock severity.  “If all my students did their homework as thoroughly as you, I’d be out of a job!”

“What I really want to know is how to avoid backlash when dispelling charms,” Tris insisted.  “Once it’s in the charm, I can’t just pull my power back into myself.  It feels like I’m working with someone else’s magic.  Is there a way to remove the power from a solidly worked charm without splashing the magic all over?”

“That’s an extremely good question.  Let’s try an experiment.”  Glassmane traced a circle in the air between them with his forefinger.  “Can you see that?”

Tris peered over the rim of her spectacles.  The circle glowed gently silver to her magical sight.  “Yes.”

“Wait.  Your spectacles don’t actually see magic?  You’re doing that unaided?” Glassmane questioned her intently. 

Removing her spectacles she handed them to Glassmane, who peered through the lenses, then looked at them from the sides, then examined the frames closely, bending the hinges and testing the strength of the ear pieces.  “Nice workmanship, but absolutely nothing magical about them.”

“Well, they do help me see more clearly,” Tris commented, holding her hand out. 

Glassmane returned her spectacles and continued.  “Fine. I’ll continue.  I want you to try dispelling this circle.”

Tris had been examining the circle all this time. Thoughtfully, she swiped her finger through one section, disrupting the line of magic.  The circle sprang open, bleeding power from both cut ends. The ends waved erratically in all directions, losing length until the working was a tiny point of power. It winked out with a gentle crackle so faint that Tris thought she might have imagined it. 

“I don’t have my magic specs on me so I’m just going to have to take your word for the fact that you did something.  But what you probably saw was a whole lot of power spraying out everywhere.”  Glassmane waited for Tris’ nod, then continued.  “Circles are easy to make stable, but when they break, they give off the messiest backlash.  That’s probably what happened to you and your friend yesterday: a lot of intense emotions, none of which lasted for more than a few moments, cycling from high to low to high again in quick progression.  Am I correct?”

“That was certainly what I experienced.  I think… yes, that makes sense.”  Something in Tris’ shoulders relaxed and she took a deep breath.  “So, how do I dispel a circle without backlash?”

Glassmane smiled ruefully.  “You don’t.  I mean, there are ways to minimize the damage, but circles are just messy.  Circle charms are often used for magic that effects the emotions, and I think it works so well because emotions are inherently chaotic.  All you can do is account for it and try not to make any lasting decisions when you’re in the middle of a storm.  However, squares now…!”  He winked.  “You’ll like squares.  They’re very tidy.”  He outlined a square in the space between them.  “See that?”

“It’s a bit wobbly,” Tris critiqued. 

“It’ll do for the purposes of the demonstration,” Glassmane defended his square.  “Now, try to dispel it.”

Approaching the silvery glow of the square with more caution, Tris studied it for a while.

“Oh, come on.  It’s not going to bite you.  Just try something,” Glassmane goaded her. 

Instead of erasing a section of any of the straight lines, Tris reached out with two fingers and pinched one of the slightly thicker points where two lines met at the corner.  The square flew apart, but instead of flailing erratically like the circle, the two freed segments described a precise and predictable arc.  The square turned inside out, folding up neatly into a quadrupled line.  The line sizzled power out of both ends in a fairly controlled fashion until it, like the spent circle, winked out of existence with a satisfying “blip!”

“As long as you know to stand clear of where it’s bleeding out power, you can avoid backlash from a square easily.  This is why so many of the great sigils: the philosopher’s square, the great square, and so forth, are built of squares.  They’re fairly easy to dispel and easy to avoid the backlash as you do so.”  Glassmane smiled.  “Does this make sense so far?  Any questions?”

Tris shook her head.  “Continue.”

Glassmane lifted his eyebrows.  “If you’re ready?  Okay, here comes the fun one.”  He drew an equilateral triangle in the air between them.  “I could draw any sort of triangle: isosceles, obtuse, whatever.  But I’ll start with the equilateral because the principle is the same with all of them.  Now, try to dispel it,” he invited. 

After a brief study, Tris tried to do what she’d done with the square, simply pinching it apart at one of the points.  The triangle remained stubbornly intact.  Next she tried swiping through one of the sections of line, like she’d done with the circle, but her magic snagged, just pulling the triangle out of shape.  Figuring she just needed to use more power, Tris pulled harder on the triangle, tapping the breezes around her and the heat from the sun shining down to pull it further off true.  She pulled until the triangle was nearly a straight line.  Then the point she was holding slipped out of her magical grip. 

Like a bowstring loosed, the stored tension rebounded.  The triangle snapped closed like a small mouth and shot its energy out the point opposite Tris’ hold, knocking a large chunk of stone out of the top of the wall and sending Lecturer Glassmane’s thick spectacles flying from their perch.  A moment later, Tris heard a delicate shattering noise as the spectacles hit the pavement below, followed by a more aggressive crunch and thump as the stone landed on top of them.

Glassmane nodded approvingly.  “And that is why triangles are often used in battle and curse magic.  Triangles are incredibly stable.  The only way to banish a triangle effectively is to use its own power against itself.  Pull hard enough, as you did, and you can use the charm’s rebound as an offensive weapon.  They are easy to aim, infinitely customizable and its almost impossible to shoot yourself with your own rebound.” 

“I am so sorry,” Tris cringed. Glassmane waved his hands, as if to tell her to forget about it. “But what if I don’t want to hurt anyone?” Tris asked. “What if I want to defuse a triangle… gently?”

Peering over the side of the low wall, Glassmane sighed. “They were new, too.” He looked back to Tris. “If you don’t want to hurt anyone? Mmm… just wait for the charm’s potency to fade?”

Tris pressed her lips together firmly. “No, there has to be a way. How do you dispel a triangle without doing…” She gestured to the notch in the wall where the stone had splintered away, “…that.”

“The trick is not to use so much power.  Why don't you try thinking like an ambient mage?” Glassmane suggested.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tris asked, schooling her voice to neutral.

Glassmane did not seem to notice the sudden chill in the air. “Well, ambient mages are limited by the source of their powers. Take those green mages that Batnose brought in to speak the other day. I think I saw you at that lecture, yes?” The question was rhetorical. He continued. “They are limited by the source of their magic. They can only work with plants and through plants and so they have to work smart and careful, because they don’t have a lot of intrinsic power. So they must calculate very carefully how little power they can get away with putting into something and still be effective. You and I can smash through obstacles with brute force, but they can’t. So, if you think frugally, like a green mage, you only use the minimum amount of energy needed to accomplish your goal. Take your time, tickle it in the right place and…” Glassmane crooked a finger, as if plucking a tiny harp. “Plink! No more backlash than pruning a leaf.”

“I do wonder where you’re getting your information on ambient mages,” Tris stared down her long nose at the lecturer. “If anything, academic mages have stricter limits on their power. Academic mages, for the most part, must rely on whatever power they contain inside themselves. An ambient mage in touch with his or her power is only limited by their mental stamina. As long as there are plants growing around them, for example, the power available to a green mage is effectively limitless.”

“Yes, but they are limited to what they have in their environment,” Glassmane argued. “For example, bring a green mage up here to this completely bare roof, what are they going to be able to do to me? If I want to bind them with an exercise of my power, how are they going to stop me?”

Tris adjusted her glasses. “Look on the ground around you. I guarantee you’ll find at least a few seeds. Blown by the wind, tracked up here on your shoes, some landed here in bird poop… if there are seeds, a green mage can grow plants. Pollen? Better hope you don’t have rose fever or a predisposition for haymaker’s eyes. It's designed to float long distances. And that’s assuming your hypothetical mage isn’t carrying particularly aggressive seeds or plants as part of their mage kit. Do you like brambleberry pie? Ever fallen in the bramble patch gathering the berries?”

“But I insist, they are limited by what is around them, or, as you are saying, what they can carry with them,” Glassmane persisted.  "An ambient mage's power is incredibly limited."

“And you aren’t? You’re limited by whatever store of magic you carry within you,” Tris pointed out. “Of course you can aid yourself with constructs. Those spectacles you have are wonderful. What happens if you forget them in your other coat? A green mage is going to have something green around anywhere that is hospitable to human life and they can draw on that for power. Even deserts and tundras hide plants in niches and nooks. You’ll exhaust what you have in here…” she pointed to his chest “…long before a green mage runs out of power to draw.”

Glassmane regarded his student thoughtfully. “You sound like you’ve given this a lot of thought.” He stood, brushing dust off his back side. “And now, I’m going to go see if I can at least salvage the frames of those spectacles.”

A blush of mortification crept up Tris’ neck. 

“See you in class next week, Cheeseman,” the lecturer called cheerily before descending the steps into the building. 


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was only after the students had asked their last questions and filed out that Briar realized he’d been hoping Tris would show up so he could apologize to her.

The attendees of Briar’s morning lecture were mostly students from the Healer’s College. He discussed ways to keep herbs fresh and how to make intelligent substitutions for rare ingredients. He didn’t recognize anyone in the audience, but it was in a smaller room, and it wasn’t even full, so he thought to himself the novelty of having a visiting lecturer must have worn off already. 

It was only after the students had asked their last questions and filed out that Briar realized he’d been hoping Tris would show up so he could apologize to her. 

Foolish, bleating, ridiculous girl!  Of all his foster sisters, how was it that she always seemed to be able to twist his emotions into knots?  And why did he keep getting the sense that she was still hiding something important from him?

He hadn’t brought much with him to the lecture. He’d left his shakkan on the windowsill of the room he was staying in. He was patting his pockets to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything, when Dedicate Crane poked his head in through the door. 

“Tris worked with a glass mage in Tharios, didn’t she? I want her opinion. Do you know where she is this morning?”

Briar shook his head. “No, but I could probably find her. What should I tell her?”

“Tell her to meet me at Professor Nepeta’s office.  You might as well come along, too.”

“What about the healers?” Briar asked.

“They can give you the day off for good behavior.”  Crane made a sour face and left.

Fortunately Tris was not angry enough with him to have closed off their connection.  It was a simple matter to follow it to the red brick building where she must be, somewhere.

“Your girlfriend is on the roof.”

“I beg your pardon?” 

The speaker was a dark complexioned man wearing the robes of a lecturer.  His hair was the same reddish color as the bricks of the building behind him.  He crouched on the pavement with a small wooden box and a little whisk broom. “You’re here for Cheeseman, right?  She’s on the roof, contemplating her sins, no doubt.  Be a good lad and fetch her down.  She broods too much.”

“How did you know…?”

“Nothing flies faster than gossip.  You kiss one girl under the trees along Tower Walk and suddenly the romantics are all writing your wedding vows for you.  The little Sherrit girl pointed a finger at me, but fortunately I have an airtight alibi for the evening in question.”  He shook the box he held mournfully.  The scratchy tinkle of broken glass deepened his frown.  “My advice?  The next time you want to canoodle with a first year student, don’t do it within the sight lines of Amell Wandon’s dormitory window.  The girl’s vision magic is superb, but she’s a soft hearted romantic and cannot imagine any passion less than grand.”

Briar blinked.  “I’ll keep that in mind.  On the roof, you say?  Figures.”

“You know her habits that well?” the lecturer asked curiously.

“We…” Briar stopped himself.  “Yes.”

The man sat back on his haunches and put the broom and box to one side.  “If she seems cautious with you it’s probably because she’s afraid of making a mistake.  She’s terrified by mistakes. But it’s clear she cares for you a great deal.”

Briar frowned slightly.  “Of course she does.  I care for her too.”

“Oh?”  The lecturer picked up his box and broom and stood.  “Well then what are you waiting for?”

Feeling like he’d missed something important in that conversation, Briar found the stairs to the roof and climbed them.  Tris was standing to face the wind, her skirts blowing behind her. 

“Don’t pay any attention to him.  He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Tris said.  “He seems to think ambient mages automatically have less power than academic ones.”

“The more fool he,” Briar said agreeably.  “Crane wants us to meet him at Nepeta’s office.  He wants your opinion as an apprentice glassmaker.”

Tris turned away from the wind, looking glorious, her skin glowing and her expression contented.  “That ceiling of his?  I’m not sure what I can add to the conversation, but I’d like another look at it myself.  There’s something very curious about it.”

For a moment Briar saw something he knew was not real.  An enormous beak shadowed Tris’ face, highlighting bright eyes that watched him intently.  Her skirts were a tail of copper plumage, spread wide in display.  She danced toward him seductively, the copper feathers chiming against each other.  Briar was mesmerized.  She called his name.  “Briar.”  She lifted her beak to the sky and called again, “Briar!”

Reality snapped back into place.  “What?”

“Come on!  Let’s go.  I don’t want to keep Dedicate Crane waiting too long.”  Tris tugged on Briar’s arm, and he followed her quietly, wondering what he’d just seen.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Akatin Glassmane’s deepest pleasure was watching the Trickster’s ultimate prank in action: to see someone you thought you knew through the lens of love, and realize how little you had really seen of them.

If you asked him if he was a religious man, Akatin Glassmane would probably laugh.But there were times, Akatin considered, that he really felt quite a bit of sympathy for Lakik the Trickster. Nobody ever seemed to get his sense of humor, but it was so necessary sometimes to shake people out of their complacency. 

Akatin had read once that the essence of humor was a radical and surprising shift in perspective that allowed you to see something familiar as something new and different.  Or to see something alien and strange as something suddenly familiar.  Akatin Glassmane had made it his life’s work to pursue various ways of shifting his own perspective, through grinding lenses to see things farther or smaller than he could unaided or silvering glass to see behind himself or around corners.  Even his fondness for teaching was rooted in his discovery of the utterly delightful and absurd misapprehensions of his students as they grappled with subjects that were old friends to Akatin.  They kept challenging him to look at familiar things in new ways. 

But Akatin Glassmane’s deepest pleasure was watching the Trickster’s ultimate prank in action: to see someone you thought you knew through the lens of love, and realize how little you had really seen of them. 

So when he saw Miss Cheeseman and her Green Mage leaving the building together, Akatin tossed the box of broken spectacle parts onto a high shelf and trotted out after them. 

“Where are you kids headed?” Glassmane asked, catching up to the pair. “The Tower Walk?” He asked for the sole purpose of watching the delightful blush that crept up Miss Cheeseman’s face. She was eight kinds of adorable, and if he were a little younger…Well, it would be quite a ride, but it wouldn’t last, Akatin knew. She was so very serious about everything. They’d drive each other to distraction in very short order. And not in that good way.

“Oh! Lecturer Glassmane!” Miss Cheeseman halted. “May I introduce Briar Moss?” she said formally.

“I know who he is,” Akatin insisted. “The ambient green mage from Winding Circle. I saw him speak the other day.” He held out his hand to Briar. “How do you do?”

Confused, but willing to play along, Briar took the other mage’s hand and shook it, as if it were their first meeting. “How do you do? Glassmane, was it?”

“That’s right.” Glassmane started walking along the trajectory the couple had been headed and the two of them fell into step on either side of him. “So, where are we going?”

Neither slowed their steps, but there was a long pause. Finally, Miss Cheeseman spoke. “We’re headed to Professor Nepeta’s office to meet Dedicate Crane. Would you care to join us?”

“Not the Tower Walk?” Akatin teased.

“Why would we be going to the Tower Walk?” Miss Cheeseman asked acerbically. 

“No reason. It’s not a very good place for it, anyway.” Akatin saw the green mage smother a grin. Miss Cheeseman just shook her head and tightened her mouth primly. “So, what’s so special about Nepeta’s office?”

It was Briar who spoke next, surprising him. “Your name is Glassmane. Is that name metaphoric or do you actually work with glass?”

Akatin considered the point. “Well, I don’t have any glass magic, if that’s what you’re asking, but I do grind my own lenses for spectacles and such and I know how to silver a mirror. I usually hire other people do the craft work to my specifications if I can, but I’m not unfamiliar with glass as a medium for magic.”

“Good. We’ve got some glass for you to look at.”

Miss Cheeseman led the way into one of the older buildings and down stairs to a gloomy basement. Two others were waiting in the semi-darkness lit only by two small windows high up at ground level on either end of the long hall. One of them spoke first.

“Glassmane? What are you doing here?” Dita Batnose did not sound pleased. “Ugh! Could this day get any better?!?”

“Hello, Dita.”

“I’m afraid Professor Nepeta is not here,” The yellow robed dedicate-mage apologized. 

“Maybe we should just do this some other time?” Dita Batnose suggested hopefully. “Maybe when there aren’t so many uninvited auditors?” She glared pointedly at Glassmane.

“What’s wrong, Dita? Am I spoiling your double date?”

“That’s not funny, Glassmane.”

“No, it’s totally funny,” Akatin insisted. “Not as funny as the time you stuck your tongue into the arch-chancellor’s ear for the education of the senior herbology students, but still pretty funny.”

“That was Nepeta’s fault,” Dita ground out through gritted teeth. “I had a bad reaction to his aphrodisiac samples.” 

“The arch-chancellor didn’t seem to mind,” Glassmane reminded her, wishing it weren’t so dark in the basement. Dita didn’t blush often, but when she did, it was a beautiful sight. 

Briar Moss looked at the bickering pair. “Am I missing something here?” 

“Actually,” Dedicate Crane inserted with a gentle cough, “what I want to show you can best be seen from the outside. I just thought this was a better meeting place. It’s a little difficult to explain how… well, just follow me.” The oddly assorted group followed Dedicate Crane back up the stairs, out the hall and around three sides of the building to where a tree trunk partially blocked a narrow passage between the corner of the building and a stone wall. “I’m sorry, it’s a bit of a squeeze,” he apologized. 

“I’ll take care of it,” Briar offered, patting the trunk familiarly. “How are you doing, old girl?”

The tree trunk moved, like a woman tiredly shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She leaned away from the building and into the wall, bumping a few bricks loose before settling again. Even Akatin had to admit it was a pretty impressive display.

Miss Cheeseman was the only one to thank Briar as she climbed through the opening. 

Once inside the odd, vaguely triangular courtyard carpeted in lush green, Akatin asked suspiciously. “Is my hair green again?” 

Miss Cheeseman regarded him thoughtfully. “No, it looks more like the building stone.” She squinted, reconsidering. “Maybe with a slight hint of lichen."

“So, what you’re saying is that I may have taken a lichen to this place?” Akatin punned. He was rewarded by a great groan from Briar.

“Shut up, Akatin,” Dita snapped. “And use your eyes for once. Look.”

The five drew closer to the stone framework of Nepeta’s translucent ceiling panel, with various reactions of awe. Dedicate Crane dropped gracefully to his knees, his hands caressing the mossy fur on the edge of the frame. “What do you think of this?” He asked Batnose. “As far as I have been able to determine, nobody comes here. With the weather we’ve been having, why is it still so green?”

Briar, not content with going to his knees, was now laying belly down in a patch of luxuriant herbs, greeting the plants as if he were making the acquaintance of a litter of puppies or a basket full of curious kittens. They curled over him, snagging wrists and belt loops in their creeping tendrils. 

Miss Cheeseman stood leaning over the panel, frowning intently at the reflective surface while shading her eyes with one hand. 

Akatin Glassmane didn’t know what to say. He patted his pocket for his pair of close vision spectacles and joined Dedicate Crane on his knees. Coiling the ear hooks into place, Akatin took a good close look at the working. Now he really didn’t know what to say.

Miss Cheeseman said it for him. “I don’t think this is actually glass.”

His world shifted, and without changing his view one bit, Akatin Glassmane saw the world from an entirely different perspective. 

“Lakik’s teeth,” Glassmane breathed. “So that’s what she meant!”

“That’s what who meant?” Dedicate Crane asked. 

“Ishabal Ladyhammer,” Glassmane said uneasily. “She said her most powerful curse she knew was also a potent blessing. And she learned it from the water above her.” He reached for the panel with one hand.

“Akatin, no!” Batnose shouted, but it was too late. 

His hand touched cool liquid. Within the water it found a shape he knew without knowing how he knew. Twisted one way it clouded the memory. Twisted the other way, it sharpened it. Nudging it with his finger, Akatin Glassmane watched the charm spin freely.

The spinning charm caught the veil shielding Akatin Glassmane from his memories of studying with Ishabal Ladyhammer and tugged it aside. The newly exposed memories jostled in his brain, rushing to regain the places they used to fit into. Overwhelmed by the flood of information, Akatin Glassmane fainted and pitched headfirst into Nepeta’s basement office.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Akatin!” Dita Batnose screamed and lunged to catch the unconscious mage. The moss under her grip pulled away from the stone and she overbalanced, tumbling in after him.

“Akatin!”  Dita Batnose screamed and lunged to catch the unconscious mage.  The moss under her grip pulled away from the stone and she overbalanced, tumbling in after him. 

With no time to think, Tris snapped a rain shield into place, but upside down.Instead of a dome above them to keep the rain off, she held a bowl below them to catch the two mages and the fall of liquid water that cascaded with them.Where there used to be a window was now open air. 

It was a good thing Batnose was still conscious.She struggled her face clear of the water in the invisible bowl while fishing for a grip on Glassmane.She heaved him up, resting his head on her shoulder, out of danger.He coughed twice, then started breathing steadily, if a bit more raspily than usual.

Tris braced herself, giving the work all her concentration.She generally didn’t need to put this much power into a rain shield.But the weight of all the collected water plus two bodies: one squirming and one dead weight, was significant.And if her concentration slipped, how badly would the two mages be hurt when they landed on the stone floor of the basement, far below them?She didn't dare reach for her braids for reinforcement.Her hair would identify her more surely than her mage's medallion.Besides, she wasn't sure how to reinforce the shield without pulling air in underneath it, and that would damage Nepeta's cherished specimens.

Briar and Crane sped the growth of various plants around the lip of the opening.Briar encouraged long runners to twist into sturdy ropes.Crane sank their roots as deep and solidly as he could.As Tris steadied the bowl containing the two mages and the liquid remains of the skylight, Dita reached for the plant rope.She handed Glassmane out first.Briar half-carried, half-dragged the semi-conscious mage out of the water and laid him nearby.Crane assisted Batnose to dry ground with much less trouble. 

As soon as her feet were under her again, Dita Batnose rushed to Glassmane’s quiet form and lifted him to pillow his head in her lap.She brushed his now sky blue wet hair away from his forehead, murmuring.“You fool.You tin-plated, near-sighted, aggravating fool.”

“Is it worth trying to keep this water?” Tris asked Dedicate Crane, indicating the rippling liquid lens contained in the hollow shape of her power.

“If possible,” Crane requested. 

“We’re going to need a barrel or something,” Briar commented. 

From below, they heard the anguished cry of Professor Nepeta. 

“I’ll go to Professor Nepeta.” Crane spoke quietly, but with authority.“I’ll see what I can explain.Briar, can you find something that might hold this water?”

“If you can find one of the janitor’s closets,” Tris suggested, “they usually have buckets.”

“Will you be okay here?” Briar asked Tris.She nodded.Briar patted her shoulder and followed Crane out of the courtyard. 

Behind her, Tris could hear Glassmane was regaining consciousness. 

“Why, Dita,” he croaked, “I thought you didn’t care.”

“That’s because you’re an idiot.And blind.And stupid.And you don’t listen.”Each insult sounded closer and closer to tears.

“But you told me my hair looked like mold!” Glassmane accused her. 

“Gah!I happen to like mold, you moron!I wouldn’t have specialized in it if I didn’t.See?It says so right here on my mage medallion!Specialties: spores, molds and fungus.If you had actually been listening to me at any point all those years ago instead of spending all your time with me staring at my chest and trying to make a pair of spectacles that could see through clothing, you might have known that!Dummy.Dork.”

“Oh, Dita.I am a fool.”Glassmane’s voice was low and heartfelt. 

Tris didn’t need to look to know what was going on behind her.Something in her chest twisted painfully.It wasn’t that she had been in love with Glassmane, or at least not that she’d admit to now.She was happy for them, really.But the wet sounds as the two mages kissed and clung to each other fueled a longing within Tris that she’d spent far too much time and energy denying.The barriers she’d built against those feelings eroded, and large wet tears fell from her cheeks to splash into the pool of water she held.

Briar touched her softly through the connection they shared.He showed her the large wooden tub he’d rolled into Nepeta’s office, and where he’d placed it. _I have no idea how long it’s been sitting in that closet, so I reinforced it a bit.It should be water tight._

Agreeing without speaking, Tris put aside her feelings as best she could and met Briar’s magic with her own.Together, they lowered Tris’ bubble of water.When it was centered over the top of the barrel, Tris opened a hole through and the water poured into the container.The tightly fitted wooden staves held the water without leaking or dripping. 

Pulling the magic she’d used back into herself, it held only a whisper taste of Briar’s green energy in it.Tris savored the feeling for a moment, then let the essence of Briar settle in to the gaps of her own magic, effectively hidden from her once more. _I’ll be down in a moment._ She told him, mind to mind, then firmly closed the connection between them.

Edging away from the two affectionate mages, Tris managed to escape the courtyard without attracting their notice, or paying them too much prurient attention.She squeezed herself through the gap between the tree and the building, but couldn’t resist looking back just once.

Akatin Glassmane and Dita Batnose weren’t kissing.They were staring at each other, their fingertips gently caressing each other’s faces, as if they were seeing each other for the first time and trying to memorize what they saw in case it was the last chance they had to do so.

Tris found Dedicate Crane attempting to cheer the obviously heartbroken Professor Nepeta.“None of your specimens were so much as bruised.We’ll cover that hole up for the night, and we can start looking into what happened tomorrow.Your plants will be fine for one night.Think of it like this.When the sky is overcast, plants don’t get as much light, but they are just fine when the clouds roll on again.”

Briar was busy weaving plants across the gap in the ceiling, creating a living thatch to protect Nepeta’s workroom from the elements.“Speaking of which… Tris?Is it going to rain tonight?” Briar called to her as she edged her way past a stack of books to join them. 

“I hope so.It looks like we have the right kind of clouds coming at us, but I’m still not as familiar with the wind patterns here as I was back home.It might blow to one side or the other.”Tris was too tired to censor herself. 

“Okay.  I’ll pull some more of the broad leaf plants over the top to make sure it stays dry.”

“Moss will also soak up the water,” Crane suggested.“Make sure you encourage more moss into the joins so rain doesn’t drip through the edges.”

“Yes, granddad,” Briar replied humorously.

Nepeta looked confused.“I’m sorry, Miss Cheeseman.I thought your given name was Ana.I apologize if I’ve been referring to you incorrectly all this time.”

Briar, Tris and Dedicate Crane all froze awkwardly. 

“Uh, it’s sort of a nickname I have for her,” Briar tried to excuse his verbal slip.“Don’t think too much about it.You’re fine.Ana doesn’t mind, do you, Ana?”

Tris shook her head tiredly.“No, I don’t mind, Professor Nepeta.I’m sorry about your skylight.”

“I just don’t understand what happened!” Professor Nepeta wailed, grieving anew.

“Neither do we,” Dedicate Crane insisted, shaking his head at Briar sourly.“We’ll have to wait until Lecturer Glassmane can tell us more.”Crane looked anxiously at Tris.“Is he feeling any better?Do you think he can explain to us what happened?”

Tris considered what to say.“I don’t think he’s in any shape to talk to us right now.”

Frowning, Dedicate Crane looked around the now gloomy basement space.“Well, it’ll be getting dark soon enough.Let’s all get a good night’s sleep and meet here tomorrow morning to discuss the matter further.I’m sure between the three… four of us…” Crane re-tallied, “six of us, we can make progress on figuring out what happened here today and how to progress.” 

“Well, I’ve done all I can here,” Briar announced.“Tr… Ana, why don’t I walk you back to your dorm?”

“Good idea,” Crane agreed.“Professor Nepeta, can I see you home?You’ve had quite a shock, today.You need a good meal and some sleep.”

“Yes, thank you, Dedicate,” Professor Nepeta accepted his offer glumly.“My poor plants.”

“As a plant mage I can assure you, your plants are content,” Crane assured him earnestly.

“If you say so…”

Briar tugged at Tris’ elbow.“Come on.There’s nothing more we can do here right now.”


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tris wasn’t speaking, and she’d closed off their shared connection.

Tris wasn’t speaking, and she’d closed off their shared connection. 

“I’m sorry,” Briar offered.

“For what?”Tris spoke pleasantly enough, but her eyes were fixed on nothing in particular ahead of them as they walked.

“Well, for… I don’t know!For using your real name in front of Professor Nepeta?For stomping out on you yesterday?All I know is that you’ve shut me out and I want to apologize for whatever it was I did that hurt you so badly.” 

Tris glanced at Briar.“None of it is your fault.You did the right thing yesterday.Glassmane explained to me a little more about backlash.It was probably best that you left before we really said things we’d regret.And as for using my name… I should have just said, ‘Tris?Who is Tris?’I didn’t have to answer you.Or I could have answered you mind to mind.You haven’t done anything you need to be too sorry for.”

Briar digested this.“Then why have you shut me out?”

He waited.They kept walking. 

Finally, “I shut you out because I have some things to think about and maybe I’d like to keep them private for a while,” Tris said.She paused, then continued hesitantly. “I think Glassmane has been in love with Batnose since they were students together.He finally figured out… well, she’s apparently loved him all along.I don’t know why they never…” She looked distant.“Or maybe I do.”

“I know you liked him.Did he break your heart, Tris?” Briar asked sympathetically.

Shaking her head, Tris denied it.“Not in the way you mean, anyway.It’s just, listening to the two of them, watching them…” She wiped her tears away hastily with the back of her sleeve and schooled her face again.“No.I don’t think I’m ready to talk about it, yet.”

“Okay.”Briar accepted this."When was the last time you ate something?"

"I had breakfast," Tris admitted. 

"And probably missed midday while Glassmane was explaining all about backlash."Briar rolled his eyes.“No wonder you’re feeling stormy.Academics.You have to remember you're not just a mind with a talent.We've all exercised our powers today.We need to eat to replenish our energy."Briar took Tris' arm in his, feeling the need for a physical connection to make up for the lack of a mental one."I'm going to treat you to dinner someplace nice.Where should we go, Miss Cheeseman?"

Tris offered him a weak smile.She didn’t argue, but directed them to an eatery that advertised "Home Cooking.” The food on the menu was all unfamiliar to Briar, being mostly traditional dishes of Karang.Despite the fact that Tris knew his food preferences well enough to be able to suggest what he'd enjoy eating, Briar almost felt as though they were near-strangers sharing a meal for the first time: Miss Cheeseman and her attentive companion who couldn't possibly be Briar Moss, because didn't the near-legendary Briar Moss have animated tattoos on his hands? 

"So, how does Miss Cheeseman enjoy Lightsbridge University?" Briar asked as a gentle conversation starter as they waited for their food.

"I enjoy it very well, thank you."Tris looked more relaxed, less distracted than he'd expected, given that she'd closed the connection between them.“Though, I have to admit, Lightsbridge University isn’t entirely what I expected it to be."

“How so?”

“I thought academic mages were all going to be very intellectual, in total control of their gifts and emotions.I thought working academic magic was going to be cleaner, less messy, less… emotional."She snorted gently."More like Niko and less like me.But the people here are just as excitable as any of us.”

“Do you feel like maybe you fit here better?” Briar asked a little sadly.

Tris shook her head firmly."I'm not sorry I came, but it's not home.I don't think I could live here for very long.Even I will run out of classes to take eventually." She smiled dreamily."Though the library…"

"Tell me about your classes?" Briar invited to forestall a repetition of Tris' previous rhapsody on the theme of the Lightsbridge Library.

Tris kept him entertained with anecdotes about various teachers and the subjects they taught until their food arrived.After a comfortable stretch of silence while they fueled themselves hungrily, Briar ventured another question. 

"And are there any young men in Miss Cheeseman's life?"He was trying to sound protectively fraternal, but to his own ears he sounded whining and jealous.He took a too large bite of food to cover his embarrassment, but Tris didn't seem to notice.

"Nobody particular," she mused."I mean, they don't segregate the classes by gender, but most of my friends are other women in my dormitory.Lisse, you've met.She's on my floor and we share two classes together.The girls of the study group, we're all in the same section of Ancient Runic.But if it were just a matter of who I met in classes, you'd think I'd have more male friends too, wouldn't you?"Tris considered this a moment."I think it's living together.Seeing people over and over at meal times or on your way in and out.That's what builds the connection."Glancing at Briar shyly, she suddenly busied herself with tearing at a piece of bread to dip in the sauce at the bottom of her dish.

"So, you like your classes.You have friends.The library is dreamy.It's different from what you expected, but how is that bad?" Briar wanted to know.

Tris made a face that was half concentration, half annoyance.“I don’t think I fit in here, entirely, but I'm not sure why.It's not even having to work like an academic mage.I haven't had any trouble with that, at least not any more than anyone else in my classes."She shrugged and tore off another piece of bread.

"Maybe it's that you feel you can't really be yourself, here?" Briar offered.

"You know, that's the funny thing," Tris said."I actually feel like I can be more like myself here than I can at home sometimes.People don't expect me to behave in any certain way.I can just be who I am, and nobody seems to mind too much.Most people here understand the pleasure of a good book, and why I might not want to be interrupted while reading."

“So what are you having trouble with?”

Briar was rewarded for his question with a small smile from Tris.“According to Glassmane, I’m too careful, too controlled.It’s ironic, isn’t it?I came here to study how to have more control over the way I work, and I’m being asked to give up that control.He’s always telling me to make mistakes.”Her face clouded.“But I have learned the hard way that, with the power I have, when I make mistakes, people die.”

“Glassmane also says you brood too much.”Briar said in an attempt to cheer her.“But when he said that, all I could think of was an image of you with your skirts all fluffed out, sitting on the girls in your library group and squawking at anyone who tried to interfere with their studying.”

Giving a chuckle, Tris wiped more tears from her eyes.“Thank you.I needed that image.”

“My plump little hen,” Briar teased affectionately, “brooding over your clutch of young academic chicks.Maybe you should go into teaching after you get your medallion here?”

Tris looked surprised.“What, you mean like as a profession?Charge students money for teaching them magic?”

“Why not?And it doesn’t have to be just magic.You know more about history and language and all sorts of non-magical things than… any of the rest of us," he finished with a vague allusion to Sandry and Daja."You’ve always had a talent for pulling information out of books.You taught me to read, remember? And there are plenty of schools that will let you teach without making you take vows.The lecturers here at Lightsbridge get paid, don’t they?I’m sure there are any number of fee-schools who would pay quite handsomely to get mage of your reputation to teach fundamentals of magic to their well-bred, rich young students.Or you could tutor privately.Or find a patron willing to endow a charity school for you?Ever fancy being headmistress of your own exclusive academy?” Briar spun ideas out as quickly and easily as Sandry spun yarn.

“That’s… I don’t know why I’ve never considered it,” Tris said wonderingly.“I do enjoy it.I just always assumed it was a part of the obligations of a mage.It never occurred to me to look for a paid position teaching.”

“There you go, Miss Cheeseman.”Briar looked immensely pleased with himself."Now you can come home without feeling like a charity case."

“But I’m still working on my control,” Tris reminded him.

“Maybe Glassmane’s right, though.You don’t have to grip your magic so tightly.You’re so closed off I can barely see that you have magic right now,” Briar told her.“And that worries me.If you let your magic go stagnant, it’ll behave unpredictably when you do finally let it go.Is there a way you can set things up so you can maybe exercise your magic in a setting where failing isn’t going to put anyone in danger?”

Tris nodded quickly.“Yes.I think if anywhere, Lightsbridge is a place where I could manage that.”She pushed her dish away."But here we've spent the entire meal talking about me and my life.What about you?I still want to hear about…" she paused, "…can you talk about her?"

She meant Rosethorn, of course.They didn't have to have an open mind-to-mind connection to understand each other on some things.“I do want to discuss it with you, but it’s kind of sensitive.I don’t want to do it here."He glanced around the busy eating house."Apparently your dorm sisters have eyes and ears everywhere.I shudder to think who else might be watching us or listening in.I'm done eating.Can you think of someplace we can go for more privacy?”

Tris frowned.“It sounds serious.” 

“I think it is.”

Tris paused to consider the matter.She took a long look at Briar and then sighed.“I can sneak you into my dorm room.We can talk there.”

“What about the eyes and ears?” Briar asked. 

“They’ve said they’re willing to help.” 


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tris stopped Briar when they were within sight of her dormitory building. She made a face. “Just… you have to understand it will mean everyone in my dorm will think we’re…” she gestured vaguely.
> 
> Briar got the point immediately. “Sharing blankets?” He offered as a euphemism.

Tris stopped Briar when they were within sight of her dormitory building.She made a face.“Just… you have to understand it will mean everyone in my dorm will think we’re…” she gestured vaguely.

Briar got the point immediately.“Sharing blankets?” He offered as a euphemism.

Tris nodded.

Briar shrugged.“You and I will know the truth.”

Tris nodded again, more stiffly.“Come on, then.”Tris led Briar across the small meadow toward the long side of the dormitory building and its grid of windows, three floors worth, each window belonging to the room of one of the girls housed within.Tris rapped on one of the windows with her knuckle and stood back.The window swung outward. 

“Sister Cheeseman!”The occupant of the room was the tall girl who had brought him water the day before.“And the gentleman in question!”

“Sister Wandon, can you provide safe passage for my caller?” Tris begged formally.“I know he is of the male variety but…”

Sister Wandon cut her off.“Say no more, Sister Cheeseman.He will have to submit to the trial, but if he passes, he will be escorted to your room with all due diligence.”

“Thank you, Sister Wandon.”Tris turned to Briar.“This is Amell Wandon.She’s the eyes of the sisterhood.She’s said she’s willing to help.”

“I think I understood that, thanks,” Briar agreed uneasily. 

“Amell, this is Briar Moss.Be gentle with him, will you?”

“The sisterhood applies only the correct amount of pressure,” Amell Wandon assured Tris, and after appraising him with a long, searching stare, reached a hand out to Briar.“Enter, young valiant.” 

Tris left Briar as he was scrambling through the window.He looked around for her, but Amell pulled him inside and latched the window firmly.She propelled him onto a chair.“Sit.” She commanded.“Stay.”

“Arf,” said Briar to signal his agreement.

The girl slid out of her room, closing the door firmly behind herself.Moments later, the room was crowded with girls, some of whom he dimly recognized from Tris’ study group. 

The laconic girl with the messy curls spoke first.“Sisters, we are here to administer the trial to a suitor of one of our favored.Who holds the beaker?”

“I do!”The familiar voice rang loudly in the tiny room.Several of the sisterhood winced slightly.Lisse Sherrit stepped forward from the crowd holding a ceramic cup as though it contained something precious.She glared at Briar as she approached. 

“This is the trial,” the girl with the messy curls intoned.“Drink it.”

Briar accepted the cup from Lisse, attempting a smile.Lisse leaned close and whispered fiercely, “If you hurt her, I will break every bone in your body.Then I will use my gift to heal you in the fastest, most painful way possible, just so that I can have the pleasure of breaking all your bones again.Are we clear?”The girl glared at Briar, trying to look fierce, and only succeeding in looking cute. 

Briar nodded solemnly, not trusting his voice to not betray his amusement.Of course he would never hurt Tris.She was as much a part of him as… well, she was a part of him.Hurting her would be like hurting himself. 

He sniffed the contents of the cup and relaxed.“Oh, good.For a minute I thought it was a love potion or something.”It was a droughtwort potion.It would render him sterile for at least a week.He was suddenly impressed with this sisterhood.He downed it in a single gulp, then made a face as he tried clearing his mouth of the taste.“You probably shouldn’t be keeping it in a glass bottle.Sunlight degrades the potency.Either use a stone jar, or wrap the glass in thick felt or paper.But stone is better.”

Lisse took the cup from Briar with a sniff, and a sidelong glance that he choose to interpret as grudging admiration. 

Amell Wandon clapped twice.“The candidate has passed the trial.Let the games begin!”The other girls filed out of the room, leaving Briar alone with Amell and Lisse.“We’ll give them a few minutes to distract the matron and then we’ll take you to Ana’s room.”

“Do you ladies do this often?”

“Do what?” Amell asked.

“Never mind,” Briar said.“I’m just glad Ana has friends like you.”

Finally, Lisse peeked through the door and nodded.Lisse and Amell escorted Briar like an honor guard, along the hall and up the stairs to the second floor where they stopped in front of a doorway, identical to every other doorway they’d passed.Briar wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to find his way here again without help.Amell knocked firmly.“Delivery for Miss Cheeseman.”

Tris opened the door.“Miss Cheeseman accepts the delivery.”She stood to one side to give Briar room to enter.“Thanks, Smelly.Thanks, Lisse.”

“If he makes you cry,” Lisse insisted hotly, “I’ll break his kneecaps.”

“Quiet, Lisse!” Amell shushed the much smaller girl gently.“Come on.The game isn’t over.”

Tris closed the door firmly behind her.She and Briar were alone. 


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m not supposed to do magic without a credentialed mage present.”
> 
> “Well, I’m here,” Briar pointed out, "and I have a medallion."
> 
> “I’m not supposed to entertain men in my dorm room either."

“Have a seat,” Tris invited tiredly.“The chair, the bed, the floor… wherever.”Briar watched as she enclosed her room in a privacy warding.Even though she seemed tired, her control was impeccable.“I’m not supposed to do magic without a credentialed mage present.”

“Well, I’m here,” Briar pointed out, "and I have a medallion."

“I’m not supposed to entertain men in my dorm room either.So, if I’m caught I get my choice of punishments.But, really, what’s the worst they can do?” she asked rhetorically as Briar sat tailor fashion on the foot of Tris’ narrow bed.Tris dragged the room’s single chair, a hard-backed wooden one, close to the bed and sat, propping her feet up on the mattress next to Briar.She sighed as she wiggled her toes in her stockings.

“Your dorm sisters have quite a set up here,” Briar commented. 

Allowing herself to be distracted, Tris asked, “Was the trial difficult?”

“No. I think I passed with flying colors and extra credit.”He regarded Tris curiously.“Do you know who is brewing their droughtwart potion?It was an amateur effort, but effective.”

Tris’ eyes widened in surprise.“Oh?No, I don’t know who brews it.Bambim, maybe?If she were at Winding Circle, I’d make sure she introduced herself to Crane.I think she’d really enjoy working with him.”She pulled the pins from her veil and stretched to deposit them on the small desk behind her. 

Nodding, Briar settled back slightly.It was not a comfortable mattress, but the chair looked worse. 

“So…?” Tris prompted, unwrapping her veil to reveal the familiar collection of braids pinned to her head.She tossed the sturdy veil onto the chest below the foot of the bed.Briar recognized that the veil was Sandry's work.He wondered if Daja had made the pins.Had he ever given Tris anything as nice?He remembered dimly giving her a packet of tea as a going away gift.

“How much have you heard about what’s happening with Rosethorn?” Briar asked.

Tris frowned.“Daja wrote that Rosethorn’s having some issues with her memory.Lark just said she was worried about her, but didn’t give details.I haven’t had a letter from Sandry in a while.I think she’s been busy helping Duke Vedris handle all those petitions summer brings.But then, you didn't write to me either.I don't know what your excuse is.”She pulled the pins out of her braids, methodically uncoiling them until they all swung free.Briar knew the ties that held the ends of the braids together were charmed to keep the magic contained in them from escaping.

Briar glared at her.“Do you want to hear about Rosethorn or not?"

"Of course I do!I'm concerned, and you've only given me hints so far.How worried should I be?" Tris asked.

Briar's face clouded over."Okay.So it started… I don’t know when it started.It’s possible she was exhibiting signs on the journey back from Gyongxe, but everything was different every day.We never got into a good routine, so it wasn’t exceptional that she’d forget which bag the soap was in or where she left her hat.And if she occasionally forgot how much water she needed to cook rice, well, we were under a lot of stress.Stress does funny things to the memory,” Briar frowned slightly.“When we returned, Lark says it took Rosethorn longer than expected to find her routine again.Lark tried not to fuss over her too much, but Rosethorn was always misplacing her shears or asking what season it was, again.”

“That sounds hard to believe of Rosethorn.”Tris leaned forward slightly.“Go on.”

“I think it must have gotten worse while we were in Namorn dealing with Sandry’s imperial cousin.I don’t know how much of that was due to that trip she and Evvy took.But Evvy came back talking about some baby lava gods she’d met.She made them sound a bit like you, actually.Cute but deadly powerful.”Briar grinned.Tris reached over to slap his knee gently, but encouraged him to continue.

“Rosethorn told me she hadn’t seen any gods, but she didn’t want to make a big deal about contradicting Evvy, who is finally starting to open up to people again after… everything that happened after Yanjing.But then I’d wonder… I’d come to visit Rosethorn at Discipline and she’d be standing in the middle of her garden holding a trowel as if she had forgotten what it was for.She’d call me by other names.Some I recognized, but most I didn’t.Then she’d blink and laugh and say, ‘I mean Briar of course!’ And everything would be fine again for a while.”Briar wrapped his arms around himself.Today he’d worn a shirt with long sleeves despite the warm weather, maybe to disguise his lack of tattoos.“I talked to Lark about it, but she said the healers had already been to see her.”

“And what did they say?”

Briar shrugged.“They had theories.They weren’t sure.Eventually, they brought a mind healer in, but he found nothing wrong with her.She seemed to be sleeping well, and yet, every day she woke up complaining about how tired she was.The hallucinations became more frequent.Lark would ask Rosethorn about her visions and Rosethorn would describe creatures out of my nightmares, or talk about Mila and Yanna coming to drink tea with them someday and gossip about which gods were fighting this week.Or she’d just ramble on like some bleating mystic, is what!”

Tris moved to sit on the bed next to Briar and put her arm around him.He leaned into her offered comfort.

“Then one night she fell asleep and didn’t wake up.The healers back home have mostly given up hope of a cure.They’re talking about making her comfortable and how to get enough food and water into her, but whenever someone mentions her getting better they give us that look.You know the one.Sad.Pitying.”Briar shuddered.“Crane likes it even less than I do.He was the one who suggested we come to Lightsbridge to consult with specialized mind healers here.And he was insistent that I come with him.  Daja and Sandry were too.I thought they were trying to protect me, shield me from having to watch Rosethorn… decline.”

“But now…?”Tris was always quick to catch his meaning.

“Crane said something to me this morning.He didn’t make a big deal of it, but he made that face, you know, the face when he’s messed up and doesn’t want to call attention to it.But he seemed to imply the healers were only interested in what I had to say.Crane has been with Rosethorn for more of this illness than I have.If this was just about her, he’s the one they’d really want to consult with.”Briar took a steadying breath.“And then when I came to find you this afternoon, when you were standing on the roof in the wind…” His eyes unfocused, as if he were looking at something hidden from normal sight.“It’s difficult to remember, exactly.I just know, I looked at you and you were different. I heard something like metal, like those thin sheets Daja hammers out, rattling against each other to make a noise like raindrops.I tasted ozone, like when you hit me with your lightning.I felt hot and then cold, but never comfortably in between.And what bothers me most is that I can’t bleating remember it clearly!” 

Briar’s eyes focused again and he looked at Tris.“I think that whatever’s wrong with Rosethorn is maybe wrong with me, too.And I think Crane knows it.I think we’ve come to Lightsbridge to find a cure for me.” 

“Oh, Briar.”Tris kept her eyes intently on Briar’s face.“Are you sure?”

Briar shook his head.“No, I’m not sure.And I desperately want to be wrong!I don’t think I’m forgetting big things yet… at least not that I can remember,” he admitted with sour humor.“But I get this feeling…”

Tris rubbed his shoulder gently.“If feelings are all you’ve got, that’s not evidence.Maybe what's bothering you isn't what's affecting Rosethorn?Maybe my magic is bleeding into yours again?Maybe that’s what affected your tattoos?”

“It doesn’t feel like what I remember from when we were kids,” Briar denied.“Or maybe it does?I don’t know if I remember clearly what it felt like.”

“Is it…?” Tris hesitated.“Does it feel like this?”She took his face in her hands and kissed him softly on the mouth.

Briar responded, pulling her closer.As Tris opened her mouth on his, she opened her mind to him as well.Briar gasped as he broke the kiss in shock.“But, you’ve always told me I’m like a brother to you!You always say you don’t feel this way about me!”

He felt a wave of frustration swamp him through their connection as Tris hissed, "Sandry! Sandry is the one who always says you're like a brother to her.Sandry is the one who insists she couldn't feel anything romantic for you because we grew up together.Sandry is the one who is so determined to keep us a platonic family that we're not allowed to express…” Tris stopped herself, took a deep breath.“No.That's not fair.Sandry can't help how she was born.She's under a pressure that the rest of us aren't and she's making the best choices she knows how."

"What do you mean?" Briar asked curiously.

Tris gave him a frustrated look, then relented, pulling away from him and settling with her shoulder against his."I'm sorry.I forget who I've talked about this to.Daja and I talked a lot about it when she was fitting me for that living metal brace I wore while the rest of my bones were healing."She rubbed at her hip in remembered pain."For all we like to say we're siblings, Sandry isn't like the rest of us.You and Daja and I were able to go out and travel the world with no more than our teachers and our own power to guide and protect us.Can you imagine what would have happened if Lark had been Sandry's only companion in Namorn?" she asked Briar pointedly."It took all three of us, plus the assistance of Zagorz and her noble cousin to get her safely out of the country again.Sandry is still an heiress, from her father's side.Even if she were dirt poor, she's politically well connected.She's young, attractive and intelligent.She knows that if she marries… when she marries… it will be political."

"So what does that have to do with you kissing me?" Briar asked, keeping his arm pressed against hers, the back of his hand just brushing the side of her leg.

"For all of her connections, she doesn't really have family, except for Duke Vedris and us.The Duke is kin, but the three of us are very important to her… sanity I would say." Tris bit her lip."And the only way she can see to keep us together is by insisting to everyone that we are family, platonic family, a brother and his sisters, nothing more.The minute that illusion breaks, if you think the rumors are bad now, just you wait.It's already going to be difficult enough for Sandry to find a partner who is worthy of her, who isn't afraid of her power, either magical or political.How much harder is it going to be if every man she meets thinks he has to compete with the three of us for her heart?"Tris looked sad."What if Sandry misses her chance to be happy because of stupid rumors about us?"

Briar frowned."So why did you kiss me?Why now?"

Tris sighed and leaned her head against Briar's shoulder."I thought I could hide it.Or run away from it.I thought, given time, I could gain control over it.I think that’s really why I came here to Lightsbridge: to forget. If I can forget how much I want you, maybe I can find room in my heart for someone else.”She sighed again.“But strong feelings are like magic.You said it yourself tonight: if you keep them stagnant, when you finally let them go they behave unpredictably.That's probably why I shocked you with lightning the other night.And I was thinking of you when I burned that love charm into the wood.It seems like the harder I try to hold back my feelings, the harder I hit you in the face with backlash when my control slips."She reached out gently to touch the freckles on the back of his seemingly naked hand."When I make mistakes with my magic, people die.With my magic so intertwined with my feelings, I'm afraid…” She pulled her hands back into her lap.“I don’t want to hurt you any more.I’m tired of hurting people.“ 

"Oh, Tris…"

“But mostly I don't want this to be a problem between us," Tris insisted.“I also don't want to spend the next twenty years of my life being bitter about it.I don’t want to treat you the way Glassmane has been treating Batnose because I’ve been too proud or too scared to admit my feelings.I want to help you with your memory, and if we can, help Rosethorn, too.But I'm no good to you if I'm spending all my energy trying to hide my heart.It's exhausting."Tris gulped nervously, then stuck her chin at him defiantly."I'm going to feel what I feel.Just ignore it.Only, tell me that you don't mind it too much, and we can go back to being how we were."

"What if I don't want to?" Briar asked stubbornly."If you have feelings for me, why shouldn't we explore that?  What if I have feelings for you?”

“Do you?” Tris asked.

“I don’t know,” Briar admitted, “But I do know I’ve been spending an awful lot of energy myself trying not to cross that line.Are we both supposed to just sit on our hands indefinitely to protect Sandry's reputation?And I still don't see why what we do has to affect Sandry in any way!Or Daja for that matter!What happens between you and me is between you and me.It’s not their business what we do with our bodies.”Briar was firm on that point.“We've got privacy shields up.Besides, you said it yourself!You're not my sister here.And we have here a whole building full of women who will be extremely disappointed if Ana Cheeseman doesn't get her man.Don’t you think it would be too strange if I came up here after I drank that dreadful tasting droughtwort potion and we didn’t…?”

Briar felt a pulse of alarm from Tris, but he reached out for her hands before she could pull away. 

“No… wait… I didn’t mean for that to panic you!” Briar said urgently.“I mean, why should we consider what the Sisterhood want us to do with our bodies any more than we should consider anybody else?If no matter what we do, someone is likely to be disappointed, let’s just make sure the people we disappoint most aren’t us.”

“But if… if they find out I'm really Trisana Chandler, they'll know you’re my foster brother.They'll think…”

“Whether you kiss me again or not, everyone in this building is already thinking we're romantically involved.But they have no proof, not with your wards protecting us!Whatever we do or do not do together is a matter between you and me, nobody else.You can’t control what people think about you, so why try?”

Tris wrinkled her forehead.“Well, there are ways to control it, but…”

“…that would be evil,” Briar finished for her, kissing the wrinkles off her forehead. 

"You really don't mind?" Tris asked, rubbing her cheek against his, enjoying the rough sensation of his stubble against her skin, so like the kiss of lightning. 

Briar laughed breathlessly."Mind?Maybe it's Rosethorn's influence on me or maybe it's in my name, but I seem to find myself inordinately attracted to the prickly ones.You, dear Coppercurls, are the prickliest girl I know.  Of course you've inspired some less-than-brotherly thoughts from time to time!"Their noses brushed."Our magic even fits together nicely.  You could be the rain to my green grass."

“Maybe the lightning to your old oak tree?" she warned.

“Or the breeze that pollinates my flowers…" he suggested with a leer.

"I'm not always a gentle breeze," Tris apologized in advance. 

"It's an ill wind that blows no good," Briar intoned solemnly.  "I've survived everything you've thrown at me so far," he pointed out, gathering her into his arms.  "You think I can't take it?"

Settling comfortably in Briar’s lap, Tris felt the storm outside breaking over their heads as their mouths met again.The first drops of a warm summer shower spattered against the window, like applause for heroic act.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rosethorn stood over them, hands on hips. “Well, I guess I owe Lark a foot rub. I thought for sure you and Sandry… Well, never mind. It's not really my business.”

Warm and soft, Tris twined around Briar like an enthusiastic sweet pea, her damp mouth raining experimental kisses on his chest, seeing which ones made him moan her name the loudest.Her efforts were interrupted by a pointed throat-clearing noise.

Rosethorn stood over them, hands on hips.  “Well, I guess I owe Lark a foot rub.  I thought for sure you and Sandry…  Well, never mind. It's not really my business.”

Tris tilted her head back to look up at their visitor.“Rosethorn?”Her hand fumbled in the empty space next to the narrow dorm bed until her spectacles suddenly appeared in them.She propped herself up on one elbow to fit the spectacles to her face.“What are you doing here?”

“She’s in my dream,” Briar told Tris, trying to tug the sheet around her more securely.

Rosethorn lifted her eyebrows.“ _Your_ dream?”

“We must have fallen asleep sometime after the rain started,” Briar concluded. 

“Oh!”Tris looked around.“So why do I still hear the rain?”

“Sometimes the real world intrudes into dreams,” Briar said with a shrug.

“And sometimes dreams intrude into the real world,” Rosethorn said, taking a seat in the hard backed wooden chair next to the bed.“I wouldn’t have interrupted you, but she seems to have something she really wants to say.” 

“That’s right!” Lisse Sherrit sat balanced in the open window of Tris’ dorm room.She was dressed like a water temple dedicate, but her hands and feet were locked in thick wooden shackles that sprouted vines like chains securing her to the window frame.“I’m not going to say I’m not grateful for what you’ve done,” she chirped energetically, “but I do NOT appreciate these.”She shook the shackles in Briar’s face.“They’re not necessary.Not at all.”She pouted.“Free me.”

“I’m not sure I know how,” Briar admitted. 

Rolling her eyes, the shackled girl said, “Just do it in the usual way.”She twiddled her fingers in the air.“With your magic.”

Rosethorn stopped Briar with a hand on his shoulder.“Briar.I’m not going to tell you not to do this, but using your power here will have repercussions in the waking world.The more rooted you are in the dream, the less rooted you are in the world.Trust me on this.There is only so much your brain can process.Memory is finite.” 

Frowning, Briar said, “I’m sorry, I know you just told me something important, but I have no idea what it was.”

“She said that you need to be careful using your magic here,” Tris clarified for Briar. 

Briar looked startled.“You can understand her when she talks like that?”

“Why is that so surprising?” Tris asked.“I’m more concerned that you can’t understand her when she’s speaking so simply.”

“It’s not his fault,” Rosethorn told Tris.“We’re laboring under a blessing placed on us by visiting Gyongxe.Our minds aren’t built to hold two worlds in it at once.Briar’s brain can’t process everything here the way I can.”

“Is that why you seem to be losing your mind in the waking world?” Tris asked.“It’s too much strain to keep the two worlds separate?”

“I’m waiting!” Lisse interjected impatiently, kicking her feet and spraying water all over the bed. 

“Rosethorn, I’m going to try and help her.Unless you can give me some good reason not to?” Briar warned. 

Briar’s teacher tilted her head to one side.“Do what you need to do, boy.”

Briar concentrated.The wooden shackles around the girl’s wrists and ankles cracked and twisted as they sprouted twigs and leaves.The splintered saplings fell away to reveal they had been held together with narrow metal bands.Lisse shook herself all over like a dog and droplets splashed from her in all directions.The metal hoops rang against each other like bangles on her wrists and ankles. 

Stretching her arm out to admire the impromptu jewelry, Lisse concluded, “I like them.I think I’ll wear them home.Won’t the others be so jealous?!”She wiggled, overbalanced and fell backward out the window.

Heedless of their nakedness, Briar and Tris lurched across the bed together in an attempt to catch the girl, but were too late.They peered hesitantly over the windowsill, expecting to see her broken body, but saw only wet pavement reflecting the pink dawn sky.

Cold water tickled the back of Tris’ neck.She wiped it off with her free hand and pulled herself back into the room. 

Abruptly, Lisse, hanging upside down above the window, poked her head into the room like a curious monkey.“And you’re wrong, Rosethorn.There’s only ever been one world.The blessing of Gyongxe draws a veil across it, but it’s an artificial division.You’re starting to see through it, but you still think you have to pick a side.”She shook her head in disgust and dropped again, kissing Briar’s cheek as she hurtled past. 

Rosethorn rolled her eyes.“Why are water dedicates so flighty?” she asked the empty air. 

“That sounded important to me,” Tris pointed out.“I think she just gave you the key to your problem.Now we just have to figure out how to use it.”

Briar flopped onto the bed, his hands behind his now damp hair.“I don’t understand any of it.But at least those bone snake things aren’t here.Or the giant spider.” 

“Hah!”Rosethorn pointed at Briar.“Didn’t I say that they would germinate with the next rain?”

Tiny sprouts dotted Briar’s arms, little curlicues of green growing from dark freckles.He examined himself with a growing sense of relief.But it was Tris who noticed the shy seedling in the middle of his chest, two fresh leaves unfurling from a single stem.“That’s new,” she pointed out.

“Double hah!” Rosethorn crowed.“I knew I’d seen that seed before!”

Briar bent his head down trying to get a good look at the new marking.“What is it?” He asked. 

“Don’t worry, boy,” Rosethorn cackled, ruffling his drying hair.“It’s just love.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

Rosethorn pointed to the eye in the middle of her forehead.“Trust me! I know it when I see it!”She winked at Tris with her third eye. 


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I have a class to go to this morning.”  
> “Do you have to?”  
> “In the grand scheme of things? No. But I want to.”

Tris generally did not get cold, but the contrast between the warm body in her arms and the wet chill at her backside was uncomfortable. She rolled over to make sure the window was securely latched and found water from last night’s rainstorm dripping in around the frame and onto the bed. She dried it with a bit of magic, noticing her privacy wards had held through the night. 

“Come back here.  It’s cold,” Briar muttered, tugging Tris to spoon against him in the bed.  “You’re cold.  Let me warm you up again.” 

Tris smiled. “I can’t stay in bed too long. It’s morning already. I have a class to go to.”

“Do you have to?”

“In the grand scheme of things? No. But I want to,” Tris insisted. “It’s one of the interesting ones. Don’t you have anything you’re supposed to do today? I can meet you afterward.”

Briar yawned. “I don’t know. Crane usually tells me at breakfast what we’re doing. Yesterday we had lectures to give.” He yawned again. “Why am I so tired?!”

“Because you stay up all night talking with Rosethorn in your dreams,” Tris replied, as though it were blindingly obvious. 

“I do what, now?” Briar asked. 

Tris rolled to face Briar. “Do you ever remember your dreams?”

“I used to,” Briar confessed. “But I haven’t in a while. Lately, I’ve been remembering bits and pieces of my dreams when I wake, but just fragments, images really. Giant spiders. Snakes made of bone.” He shivered. “Makes me glad I don’t remember more. Although last night…” Briar changed his tone abruptly, reaching around Tris to pull her body close to him again. “All I remember about my dreams last night was you.” 

Tris rested her head against Briar’s chest. After a while, his breathing slowed again, gentled. That’s when Tris noticed the little seedling planted over his heart. She stroked the new tattoo gently with one finger. “I love you too, Briar.” Tris reconsidered then if her dream had just been a dream. 

“Mmm…” Briar said, mostly asleep. 

It wasn’t long before Tris heard him snoring. After debating whether to wake him again or not, Tris decided to let him sleep. She felt a little guilty now that she hadn’t believed him when he said he might be suffering the same illness as Rosethorn. She hoped his morning sleep would be more restful than his night’s activities. She dressed quietly and collected her things. After a moment’s deliberation, she removed the privacy wards and scratched out a note for Briar. She blew on the ink to dry it, then placed it on the bed next to him. The new tattoos on his arms and hands had taken firm root overnight and were in the process of uncurling fresh leaves of their own. 

Tris scratched on Sister Leh’s door to tell the Ears of the Sisterhood personally that she’d left the package in her room and would come to collect it after her class. 

“I didn’t hear a thing from your room last night.Did you sleep well?” Sister Leh asked meaningfully. 

Tris just smiled.

Usually, Tris looked forward to her lectures with Professor Honeywort. She was engaging and sometimes went off on hilarious tangents about what could go wrong in a busy potion brewing workroom. Those stories always reminded Tris of her time spent helping out in Dedicate Crane’s work room. But today she was feeling distracted and twitchy. Something about that dream she’d had with Briar nagged at her. 

She tried to concentrate on taking notes relevant to the lecture, but instead Tris found herself scribbling random thoughts in the margins of her paper.

_Giant spiders? Snakes of bone?_  
_Gyongxe. Blessing._  
_Draw a veil across memory._  
_???_  
_Two worlds? One world? Choosing sides?_  
_What was Lisse doing there?_

Tris didn’t know what it meant, but she hoped the library might hold some clues. She was wondering if she had time before Briar woke to see if she could do some research on Gyongxe, when she noticed a newcomer had disrupted the class. It was Dedicate Crane. He made apologies to the lecturer, and waved at Tris to come to the front of the room. Reluctantly, Tris packed her notes and books and obeyed his summons. 

Dedicate Crane was very earnest in his conversation with the potion brewer. “You’re discussing tinctures today? Oh, yes, very important. But I really think you can excuse Miss Cheeseman just this once. I happen to know her abilities and I am entirely confident that she can catch up to the the material on her own time, Provided your books are any good. What texts are you using for this class? Oh! One of mine! Yes, yes, an older work, but still sound. I believe you’ll find Miss Cheeseman has a solid command of all the fundamentals I outline there. If that will be all? Yes.” With a smile and a gracious little bow, Dedicate Crane took Tris by the elbow and propelled her swiftly out of the room. Once they were out of sight of the class, he rounded on her, desperately. “Do you know where Briar is? I haven’t seen him since he left Professor Nepeta’s office with you yesterday and the maid said he wasn’t in his room all night.” His worry was palpable. 

“He was with me. When I left my room this morning he was still sleeping,” Tris managed to tell him without a blush. “We had a lot to talk about last night. He told me more about Rosethorn. Is it true?” She asked, preferring not to give him a chance to ask questions about how she and Briar spent the rest of their night together. “Do you think he’s ill with the same condition Rosethorn has?” 

Dedicate Crane closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose firmly.“He’s aware of it now, is he?”

“I think his awareness of it comes and goes,” Tris told him bluntly.“There’s something interfering with his memory, but I don’t think it’s a disease.Were you aware that he’s sharing dreams with Rosethorn?”

“He’s what?” Crane squawked, then hushed himself.“Come on.We shouldn’t talk about it here.”

They found a miraculously empty study room in the library. 

“Tell me what you know?”

Tris told Crane everything Briar had told her about Rosethorn’s condition and then explained about the dream she’d shared with him the night previously. She was not completely honest about the entire content of the dream, but relayed Rosethorn’s theories about two worlds, and the contradictions from the wet version of Lisse Sherrit. “It seems to have something to do with Gyongxe. I’m hoping we can find some reference to a blessing placed on people who visit Gyongxe. But in both the dream and when he was awake, Briar has mentioned giant spiders and snakes of bone as recurring images. Maybe looking for those will help you find something?” 

“Really, Trisana?It came to you in a dream?That’s wishful thinking at best,” Dedicate Crane scoffed. 

She peered over her spectacles at the older mage.“Do you have any more promising leads at the moment?” she inquired.

"The skylight...!"  

"Which may or may not be anything more than ordinary water," Tris reminded him.

Dedicate Crane eventually closed his eyes in surrender. “Fine.” He sighed. “I sent a note to Lecturer Glassmane to meet us at Professor Nepeta’s later this morning. Let me see if I can find anything here that might corroborate your…” he grimaced, “dream. If you will collect Briar and meet us at Professor Nepeta’s?” 

Tris agreed.“I’d probably look for hints in mythologies or maybe even bestiaries written about Gyongxe, rather than trying to find reference in their histories.If there’s something affecting Rosethorn’s and Briar’s memories of the place, I’m betting they aren’t the only ones.”

“Don’t teach me how to meditate,” Crane told her as he dismissed the privacy wards.“I’ve been doing research longer than you’ve been alive.”

“My apologies,” Tris said by way of goodbye.


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What are you doing here?” Professor Nepeta sounded resentful to discover Akatin Glassmane waiting by the door to his violated work room.

“What are you doing here?” Professor Nepeta sounded resentful to discover Akatin Glassmane waiting by the door to his violated work room.

“I got a note from Dedicate Crane, asking me to meet him here. Can I wait inside with you?”

Nepeta just sighed and unlocked the door. Glassmane followed.

“Oh, no!” Nepeta cried, rushing back to where his plants stood, untouched, on their shelves. “What happened to the barrel thing?”

Glassmane followed to see the staves of the wooden tub had twisted, cracked and fallen to the floor. Small green leaves poked erratically from the curves and hollows of the broken wood. The iron hoops that had held the tub together were gone. “What was in there?”

“The water… Dedicate Crane said it used to be my window.”

Both men looked up hopefully. The gap in the ceiling was still covered in the woven mat of leaves and moss the green mages had grown to keep the weather out. Looking down, they saw the floor was entirely dry.

“Maybe the wood absorbed it?” Professor Nepeta ventured.

Glassmane shook his head. “That looks like the work of a green mage,” he pointed out.

Nepeta frowned. “The younger one, Briar Moss, said he’d reinforced the wood so that the water couldn’t leak out. Maybe he did it wrong?”

“It’s possible he made a mistake,” Glassmane admitted slowly. "Or…?"

A tap on the door announced a new arrival. “Hello in there! Is anybody interested in what I found this morning?” Dita Batnose sounded entirely too cheerful for the early hour.

“I love you, Dita, but dial the sunshine back a few notches and come take a look at this,” Glassmane told her.

Batnose whistled her appreciation at the destruction. “That’s impressive.” Then she brandished a nice thick stack of paper bound with string. “But I did some research this morning. Isn’t anybody interested in what I found?”

“Sure, Dita,” Glassmane agreed tiredly. “Tell us what you found.”

“Who do you think the previous occupant of this office was?” she asked.

Lecturer Glassmane shook his head. “Oh, no. We’re not playing guessing games with you. Tell us or don’t.”

“Fine.” Dita placed the stack of notes on Nepeta’s desk and untied the string holding them together. “The last occupant was Ishabal Ladyhammer.”

Glassmane held his hand up. “Stop. Stop right there.” He closed his eyes for a long moment. “Yes, this must have been her private work room. None of us were ever let in here.” He opened his eyes and looked around. “Nepeta? Are any of the other offices down here occupied?”

Professor Nepeta considered this for a moment. “Professor Birdspeaker had an office down the hall, but I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“No, you wouldn’t have seen her. She’s moved on,” Dita told him gently.

Nepeta’s face screwed up. “She’s dead?”

Glassmane laughed. “No, she just accepted a position with one of the minor noble houses of Sotat. She found work as as their falconer and hunt mistress. It sounds like a very cushy job.”

Batnose frowned at Glassmane as he slid past her, his hands familiar on her hips. “But it means she’s no longer associated with the University.”

“One minute. I’ll be right back,” Glassmane insisted. After some creaking, banging and thumping noises, Glassmane appeared in the doorway with two chairs. “When we were down here, we students had a meeting room at the end of the hall. I just remembered. Nobody must have claimed those rooms, because all the furniture is still there.”

“You studied with Ishabal Ladyhammer?” Nepeta asked Glassmane with a frown.

“Well, yes and no.” He placed a chair for Batnose. “Let’s just say I learned from her. Until yesterday I had forgotten most of it.” He dragged the second chair into the room and placed it cozily next to the first.

“Not so close,” Dita fussed. “You’re practically sitting in my lap.”

With a blandly neutral expression on his face, Glassmane bumped his empty chair with a hip, pushing it even closer to Batnose before taking a seat, his thigh pressed close to hers. Then he made a big production out of smothering a yawn and stretching as an excuse to drape one arm over Batnose’s shoulders. She made an irritated noise, but didn’t object.

“So, where did you discover this?” Nepeta asked Batnose, lifting the top page off the stack to study it.

“Administration keeps records of all these things, you know. You just have to know where to look, and make sure you bring enough pastries to keep everyone else in the office occupied,” Batnose said smugly. "Since I was already there looking up Cheeseman's class schedule for Dedicate Crane, I figured I might as well poke around a little. I know the occupants of every work room are encouraged to make notes on the condition of their rooms when they move in and move out so that the facilities can be updated or repaired when the keys change hands. I was hoping we could learn a little more about the provenance of your former skylight, Nepeta. However, Ishabal Ladyhammer makes no written mention of the window or anything unusual in this space that I have been able to find. Neither do any of the other mages who have occupied this room. But then, you don’t reference it in any of your work either, do you, Nepeta?”

The mage in question shook his head mutely. “It just never seems like something I need to mention.” He frowned. “When I say it like that it does sound odd, doesn’t it? It is one of the key factors in my work. Why wouldn’t I be curious about its influences on my plants, even to disprove that it had an influence? It cast a peculiarly filtered light, and Dedicate Crane tells me it looked like there were charms worked in between the layers of glass.” Nepeta coughed gently. "That is, in the layers of water that looked like glass. I didn't even know what it was made of until yesterday!"

“Well, I kept digging. About three hundred years ago, this basement… the whole thing, mind you… was the workroom of the notorious Afon Blessingbroke,” Lecturer Batnose continued, thumbing through the next few sheets of paper in her stack of notes. “He liberated artifacts from temples all around the Pebbled Sea region, and catalogued the results. Today we would think it was unconscionable how he took these things from their indigenous cultures without capturing any information on context or how items were used,…”

“…not to mention the fact that he was little better than a bandit, but without even the excuse of needing to steal to survive…” Glassmane muttered.

Batnose glared at Glassmane for interrupting her and continued, “However, it is recorded that he submitted an application for permission to undertake a great working with his friend and sometime partner in crime, Irai Rockdriller. Ah, here it is!” She brought the paper in question to the top of the stack. “The administrator who came to check the soundness of the work before Blessingbroke was able to reclaim the space for his own use made notes about it: Basement Room Expansion, V. Fine Skylight installed. Pass. So we know approximately how long it’s been up there.”

“Is that all?” Glassmane inquired, leaning in to read over Dita’s shoulder.

“So, uh, I do apologize, but history was never my best subject,” Professor Nepeta said, “But who was this mage, Blessingbroke?”

Glassmane barked a short, mirthless laugh. “He was one of our great mage predecessors here at Lightsbridge. But if you ask me, he was little better than a mercenary. He specialized in war magic and favored contracts that took him into religious wars. Some even accused him of stirring up trouble between rival sects in order to profit from the resulting conflict.” Riffling fingers through his hair, which in the basement space had taken on the dark grey of old cobwebs in shadows, the lecturer continued. “He discovered a talent for curse breaking later in his career, and applied it to his less martial expeditions.”

At Nepeta’s confused glance, Batnose clarified, “He stole various temple artifacts by breaking the curses that were intended to stop people from just walking off with their golden statues or their…” she turned to Glassmane, “…decorative windows?”

“Maybe not just decorative?” Glassmane raised his eyebrows at Dita.

She nodded, “That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Who do you want on the team?” Glassmane asked.

“You, me, Nepeta, of course. He’s got insight on how it worked from a practical perspective, and maybe he’s captured more in his notes than he’s published.” Batnose shot an inquiring glance at Nepeta. “Are you in?”

Nepeta frowned, “In what?”

“We’ll need one of the runic specialists, but not Gemcracker. I can’t understand what she’s saying half the time,” Glassmane continued. “And we’ll need at least one mage who can approach this from the religious angle. I wonder if Dedicate Crane would be willing to stick around? Doesn’t he worship a water goddess? Cranes are water birds, right?”

“We could ask,” Batnose agreed with Glassmane. “We’re putting together a research team,” she clarified for Nepeta. “We’re going to research your skylight. And maybe, with the proper funding, we’ll be able to replicate it. I know you’re already a full professor, but with your main focus of study sidelined for the moment, you’ll need a new project. Glassmane and I are still Lecturers. This looks like the sort of project that could build our reputations as serious mages. I don’t know about you,” she returned her attention to Glassmane, “But I’d like to be full professor before my hair is completely white.”

“Your hair will never go grey,” Glassmane informed her solemnly. “It’ll just mold as you get older.”

“Ha. Ha.” Batnose stuck her tongue out at Glassmane, who grinned.

“Can I draft Cheeseman?” Glassmane continued. “We’ll need some assistants to run errands and take notes and her handwriting is gorgeous.”

“Just her handwriting, huh?” Batnose inquired archly. “Fine. I’ll see if we can massage her class schedule a little. Who else…?”

The pair discussed who they wanted on their team to tackle the problem, fielding occasional suggestions and questions from Nepeta.

It wasn't until Batnose had finished three copies of a work plan and handed one to each of the other two mages that Miss Cheeseman's name came up again. Nepta spoke. “I was so upset yesterday that I didn't think much of it, but I think Miss Cheeseman has worked with Dedicate Crane and Briar Moss before. Where is she from, originally?"

"She looks like she might be from somewhere west of the Pebbled Sea. Capchen or the like?" Batnose offered. "She's certainly less flighty than most first years. If she has some experience working with credentialed mages, that might account for it."

Professor Nepeta considered this. "They seemed very close. Briar Moss even had a nickname for her. Lisse, or something?"

Glassmane snorted. "And she didn't slap him? Lisse is a classmate of Ana's. So I don't think you heard that right. Nobody likes their sweetheart to call them by someone else's name. I think she must be some sort of childhood connection of his. But he was raised in the Winding Circle circle temple near Summersea, wasn't he?"

"Not just that," Batnose insisted. "He's one of those four. You know, the young prodigies who broke through the Namornese border protections and sent Ladyhammer into retirement?"

"She won't stay retired," Glassmane predicted confidently. "They have to be overstating the damage she took. No ambient mage has enough power… no, not even four ambient mages together, Dita… to break through Ishabal Ladyhammer's control. I was in a group of five academic mages who tried, and we got nowhere.”

"I remember now. It wasn't Lisse. Briar called her Tris," Nepeta corrected.

"That doesn't sound like a name for a girl from Capchen," Batnose mused. "They usually have long mouth-filling names like Lala-nini-ana or something, don't they?"

"Maybe her name is really Trisa-nini-ana?" Glassmane suggested, to hear Batnose laugh.

"I wonder where Dedicate Crane is," Nepeta worried. "He said he was going to come check on my plants this morning."

"He should be here by now," Batnose confirmed. "But I can't wait for him any longer. I have a lecture to give."

Glassmane accompanied her out, stealing kisses from her in the shadowed stairwell.

"What are you doing with the rest of your morning?" she asked, fending him off in the daylight.

"I think I'm going to poke around downstairs a little more. I want to see how many more of my memories I can fit into their proper context." He laughed a little ruefully. "The funny thing about getting all those memories back is that I spend a lot of time wondering what else I'm forgetting."

"It'll come to you." Batnose gave him a last kiss before walking away, putting a satisfied wiggle in her hips.

Grinning, Akatin Glassmane watched her go. When she turned the corner around the next building and was lost to his sight, he went back down the stairs to the basement whistling a bawdy song he trusted nobody listening knew the words to.


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Briar rolled over. Something crackled against his left shoulder blade. He wriggled to scratch it, but it had done its worst. He was now awake with a note from Tris in his hand.

Briar rolled over. Something crackled against his left shoulder blade. He wriggled to scratch it, but it had done its worst. He was now awake with a note from Tris in his hand. Yawning, Briar propped himself on his elbow to read:

_You seemed very tired, so I decided to let you sleep. I have a lecture to attend. I’ve taken the wards down, so stay put and don't startle the Sisterhood if you can help it. I have some ideas about what's wrong with you and R. Let's talk more when I get back. -T_

_p.s. If you're hungry, I have some almonds in a jar on the second shelf._

Briar smiled and left the note on the pillow. He wasn't entirely sure what this surprising new physical development to their friendship would lead to, but even in the morning light it didn’t feel like it had been a mistake. Being with Tris was comfortable. She wasn’t the most exciting partner he’d ever enjoyed, but their time together gave him a new perspective on the woman Tris had become. Some things he could have predicted. She was very goal oriented. She was focused. She was almost too focused. Briar had to remind her to relax on more than one occasion, as she tried to think her way through an experience that really worked best if you simply surrendered to it.

Other things about Tris in bed surprised him. For some reason, he’d imagined she’d be ticklish. She wasn’t. In fact, she seemed to crave an intensity of sensation that for another partner might have been pain. And her breadth of knowledge about sexual acts rivaled his own. Briar supposed there really was a book for everything.

He'd just pulled his shirt on when someone scratched gently at the door. Briar paused, holding his breath, trying to decide if opening the door half dressed came under the heading of "startling the Sisterhood." Whoever it was, however, had no fear of being startled. Lisse poked her curls around the edge of the door. "Oh, good. You're awake. Can I come in?"

As the damage had been done, Briar nodded agreement. Lisse slipped into the room and closed the door behind herself. "Are you here to break my kneecaps?" Briar asked jokingly.

"Now why would I do that?" Lisse wore a dress very much like the dress Tris had been wearing yesterday: blue with little white embroideries at the hem. It may even have been the same dress. Though Tris, Daja and Sandry were different enough that they didn't generally share clothing, Briar knew borrowing a dress from a sister or friend was common practice among many women. "Tris told me to come fetch you. There's something I want you to see.” She held out her hand to Briar, bangles at her wrist jingling against each other. Before what she had said really registered he took her hand.

"Wait… you said Tris?"

Briar was suddenly standing unsupported on the steeply pitched dormitory roof. He flailed his hands and sat down hard on the slick tile, sliding several inches until the seat of his small clothes snagged in a gap between two tiles. He found a tenuous grip with his bare toes, rooting them as best he could against the near edge of the gutter. He was three stories up. The night's rain had washed everything clean. Frantically searching for something his magic could use to protect himself from a precipitous drop, he found a few seeds buried in the composting remains of last autumn's leaves. He started them growing, but they were rooted only shallowly. Briar feared they wouldn’t do him much good. He had tucked a few balls of various seed mixes into his sash yesterday, but they were still probably tangled with the rest of his clothes at the foot of Tris’ bed. Briar had not felt this helpless in a long time.

"Isn't that her name?" Lisse stood behind him, sure footed on the slick tile as she gazed out over the dormitory meadow. "I'm sure that's the name you were moaning last night when she was doing that thing with her mouth on you."

Briar was glad she couldn't see his face. "You were spying on us?"

"Watching over. Spying. Are they different?" Lisse asked. The bangles on her ankles jingled as she moved closer to Briar and sat next to him. "I want you to know that I'm very grateful to you for releasing me last night. But I have a couple more questions for you, if that's okay?"

"Are you going to hurt me?" Briar squeaked nervously.

She laughed.  "Questions don't hurt!"

"But do we have to do this up here?" Briar asked, trying not to think of possible consequences if she didn't like the answers he gave. The green heads of meadow grasses had grown tall enough to poke over the rim of the gutter. There had to be a way to use them, somehow!

"What's wrong with up here?" Lisse asked curiously. "I wanted to show you how pretty everything looks after the rain. I was hoping you’d like it. It reminds me of home."

"Where's home?"

"Oh no you don't. You can't distract me like that. My memory is sharp now! Sharp!" She bared her teeth at Briar. They looked like river washed pebbles. At least they weren’t filed to points like the ones of that one woman outside of Chammur.

"Who are you?"

She sighed. "Okay, maybe my memory isn't as sharp as it was. I've changed, maybe. I don't entirely know who I am. So I wanted to ask you if you knew my name?"

Briar shook his head. "I'm sorry. If you're not Lisse Sherrit I don't know who you are."

Lisse-not-Lisse shook her head. "That doesn't sound right. Lisherrit doesn't sound like the right name at all." She bumped her shoulder against Briar's. His shirt was suddenly damp all down that sleeve. "I went home last night, but something must have happened after I left. I couldn’t find my waterfall. When I got there, all I found were a couple of bendy places in the river. I couldn't find my temple. I couldn't find any of my dedicates. I hope nothing bad happened to them."

"Were you a goddess?" Briar asked, suspiciously.

The maybe-goddess drew herself up. "AM! I am a goddess. I just don't know of what anymore. I can't seem to find anything with my name on it."

"And you don't know what your name is?" Briar ventured hesitantly.

"No," the goddess moped, slumping sullenly against Briar. He was now soaked to the skin on that side.

"I'm betting you're a water goddess," Briar told her, feeling a bit chilled, despite the morning sun hitting the back of his neck over the ridge of the roof.

He could practically feel the goddess rolling her eyes. "Well, yeah. Of course I am. But which one?" She shook Briar's arm in her frustration, making him reach desperately for the tile with his other hand, for fear she'd shake him loose from his perch. “There are so many of us! We're never all one thing, and I want to know what else I am! So I'm water and… what?"

"You said something about a waterfall?" It occurred to Briar that if he was going mad the way Rosethorn had, at least here on the roof nobody could hear him having a conversation with his new imaginary friend.

"Yeah!" the goddess agreed enthusiastically. "Wanna see?" Without waiting for the answer she slid her feet over the edge of the roof and fell straight down from the gutter, pulling the green plants he’d sprouted down with her, roots and all.  

Briar yelped, but didn't move.  So much for that hope. The plants were gone.  A few moments later he heard the chiming of the goddess’ impromptu jewelry behind him. She returned to his side, sliding down the tiles from the ridge of the roof.

"It's fun! Why don't you try it?" she prompted.

"I would die," Briar told her.

"Oh. Well, that's no fun," she agreed. "But you don't mind if I do?"

As he watched the self-described water goddess kick her feet over the edge of the roof again, a quiet voice inside Briar’s head asked: wouldn’t a quick death now be better than the slow lingering death by starvation now facing Rosethorn?

"I thought you had more questions for me?" Briar asked, hoping to distract her. Or maybe to distract himself. His heart was still pounding far too fast. He didn't really want to die. He stretched his magic out desperately, but found nothing green within reach of the roof. Maybe he could try to convince this goddess to find him a safe way down.

The goddess blew through pursed lips, making a wet burbling noise. "Yes! I wanted to ask, who's that guy, the one with the really pretty hair? Is he sworn to another god? Do you think he'd like to dedicate himself to me?"

Briar laughed at how much she sounded like a schoolgirl with a crush. "I don't know. I suppose you could ask him…?" But it seemed like a safe enough topic to start with. "His name is Glassmane and he's a mage."


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was clear something was wrong before Tris even reached the dormitory building.

It was clear something was wrong before Tris even reached the dormitory building. People ran by her in both directions. As much as she hated running, she decided it was probably a good time for a sprint.

A crowd of students stood in the meadow next to the dormitory, their faces upturned. From this distance, Tris could see a figure on the edge of the roof. She removed her spectacles and improved her vision, but she knew somehow, even before she could see him clearly, that it was Briar. Yet when she tried connecting to him, mind to mind, her magic just kept sliding off. It was like he was there in outline, but not in substance. He was as distant as a figure in a dream.

He looked terrified.

Lisse ran to her. "Ana! You have to fix this! We don't know how he got up there, but the roof is too steep! You can see he keeps slipping!" Tris blinked her eyes back to normal and put her spectacles on her face again. "Is he having a bad reaction to the droughtwort? Is this my fault somehow?"

"Of course not. Why would you think this was your fault?" Tris considered the situation. "Can you do me a favor, though?"

"Yes, of course, Ana!" Lisse agreed instantly. "What do you want me to do?"

"I know there are Eyes and Ears in the Sisterhood. Is there a Voice?" Tris asked urgently.

Lisse was uncertain. "I don't think so?"

Tris gripped Lisse by both shoulders. "I don't know if I have the authority to do this, but I need you to be the Voice of the Sisterhood. Organize the others and have them keep everyone off this meadow, understand? Get people around the perimeter and and don’t let anybody get too close to me. Jump up and down, wave your hands in their faces and yell at them as loud as you can to keep off this lawn." She released Lisse and fumbled for the pins in her veil. She fastened the pins to the front of Lisse's dress to keep them out of the way. Tris had felt happy when she woke this morning in Briar's arms, so she'd chosen a bright sunshine colored veil to cover her braids. She handed the bright piece of cloth to her friend. "Use this to attract people's attention if you need to. But you have a very powerful voice. Use it.”

"Are you going to try something dangerous? Are you afraid if people get too close they'll distract you and you'll hurt yourself?" Lisse was concerned. She followed Tris a few steps.

Tris paused, uncoiling one thick braid from the arrangement on her head. "No. But if people get too close to me, I could hurt them. I need you to keep them away so I don't kill anyone by accident.”

Lisse squeaked and fell back. "I'll do it!" she shrieked and ran toward the crowd in the center of the field to herd them with shouts and flaps of the yellow veil out to where Tris wanted them.

It had been a while since Tris had attempted anything like this, but she'd done it before. In theory she should be able to lift herself to the roof, collect Briar and return to the ground safely on a platform of air. The breeze this morning wasn’t strong enough to support her by itself, though. Tris calculated how much power she'd need and began combing wind out of her hair as she approached the building. She could hear Lisse ranging behind her, yelling at people to stay back. Other girls had taken up the call, but none of them had voices as loud and penetrating as Lisse Sherrit’s.

Stopping a few feet from the foundation of the dormitory building Tris turned in place, noting that Lisse had done her job well. She was still jumping up and down and yelling at people, but they seemed to be listening to her and doing what she said. That was the one worry Tris had had. Lisse's voice might carry, but she was prone to second guessing herself, asking questions when she knew the answers. But her friend had risen to the occasion. And now it was Tris' turn to rise.

She knew that if she stopped working now she could probably concoct a suitable lie to explain what she was doing. She could still be Ana Cheeseman, ordinary first year student. She would have the friendship of the sisterhood. And if Sandry and Daja heard rumors about some student Briar had romanced at Lightsbridge, they wouldn’t even blink. Of course he’d met someone. He always met someone. If Briar wanted to tell them the truth, that was up to him, but it wouldn’t be publicly known.

But Briar admitted he was having lapses in memory. Despite her blithe assurance that a green mage could practice his craft even on the roof of a building, Tris couldn't erase the look of fear she'd seen on Briar's face. It didn't matter how powerful or resourceful he was if he couldn't remember himself enough to get out of whatever predicament he was in.

Tris kept turning. Now, facing the building, she let the wind gather in a tight spin around her. She pressed it down into a flat, wide disk of air. Stepping up, the middle of the vortex closed tightly into the space where she'd once stood. Carefully holding the platform steady, she encouraged the spiral of winds under her to stretch, like a potter pulling clay up the sides of a pot. She rose, up past the windows of the first story, the second story, the third story, up to the edge of the roof where Briar sat, soaking wet and petrified.


	27. Chapter 27

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The wind kicked up. Briar gripped the tiles with his toes and hunkered down as best he could.

The wind kicked up. Briar gripped the tiles with his toes and hunkered down as best he could without shifting his center of gravity. The water goddess had been crying on his shoulder, hopeless muffled sobs that sent a literal torrent of tears cascading down his back and chest. The wind seemed to calm her. She lifted her head expectantly.

A great-beaked woman rose above the edge of the roof, her great cape of copper feathers chiming cacophonously in the rising wind. “What are you doing, little sister?” she addressed the girl who was not Lisse Sherrit.

“Why am I here?” the wet goddess sobbed. “Why do I only remember some things and not others?” She wailed, “What’s my name?”

“These are good questions, little sister, but this young man does not have the answers you seek. Why have you uprooted him so unkindly? Don’t you know that green plants need a firm footing to thrive?” The bird-winged goddess was not angry, but she spoke sternly. “We need to replant him carefully before I can help you answer your questions.”

The water goddess sniffed and dragged the back of her arm across her face. “But he’s the only one I trust!”

The feathered goddess smiled sadly. “Those are not your feelings. Those tears belonged to his sister.”

“Do you mean Tris?” Briar asked. “Am I only supposed to think of her as a sister, then?”

“All who walk together on a path are siblings. Why does this make you think less of her?” The bird-woman’s gaze was bright and piercing. Briar suddenly felt like he did when Rosethorn asked him an important question and he didn’t know the answer.

“I don’t know,” he admitted finally. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t love her,” he told the goddess a bit defiantly.

“Then what stops you?” Asaia, the Bird-Winged lifted her beak to the sky and called. “Briar!”

“What about me?” the girl goddess asked.

“Come,” Asaia held her hand out to the the water goddess. Lisse Sherrit’s form wavered as she stepped into the Goddess’ embrace. The copper feathered cape closed around her. Water sprayed out in all directions.

Briar flinched, averting his eyes. He was wet and cold. The fresh spray and the wind was chilling him further. His teeth started to chatter.

“Briar!” Asaia’s voice was harsh. “Ultimately, you must answer your own questions.” She held a hand out to him. “Come.”

Thinking of the three story drop he knew awaited him if he stepped over the edge of the roof, Briar hesitated. “I don’t want to die like this, in madness.”

“This isn’t madness. This is truth,” the bird-winged goddess promised him. “Trust me, Briar!”

Briar squinted against the wind, blinking. Tris reached out to him now. Again? A thick hank of her hair was flying loose as she commanded a platform of winds.

“Just trust me, and take my hand!” she yelled over the roaring, rushing sound of the air supporting her. She stretched over the edge of the roof, desperate to reach him, but a few inches short. Gone was the copper cape, gone was the great beak, just red hair and a pale, urgent hand straining to touch him. “I can get you down safely!”

Briar opened his mind to her and knew she was real. Down below, he saw people like small game pieces ringing the meadow, keeping people clear while Tris worked with her strong winds.

“I think you’re crazier than I am!” he yelled over the air battering the dormitory roof. The lead gutter was shuddering, trying to break free. Briar reached for Tris. He half-slid, half jumped the remaining few feet to the edge of the roof, where Tris caught him and pulled him to her, tightly. “Thank you,” he murmured, not sure if she heard him or not.

Their descent was smooth and controlled, but it still made Briar’s stomach lurch. When the bottom of her platform of wind started tearing at the grass under it, Tris helped Briar step down onto solid ground and dismissed the air she’d summoned. The silence felt like gongs ringing in Briar’s ears. His knees wanted to buckle, but Tris held him with more physical strength than he imagined she possessed.

Briar flinched when Lisse yelled out over the group, but she kept her distance from Briar and Tris. Instead, she continued running back and forth, shouting over the crowd noise.

“We need to find out her real name or she won’t leave me alone,” Briar insisted urgently.

“Whose name, Briar?” Tris asked.

“There’s a goddess, a water goddess. She says she used to be a waterfall.” Briar blinked. He saw two of Tris, blurring together. “We need to find her name.”

Tris patted him comfortingly.

“You must think I’m going crazy, too,” Briar accused her without any heat.

A group of three people carrying healer’s kits scurried toward Tris and Briar, reaching them just in time to catch Briar as he fainted.


	28. Chapter 28

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tris managed to use Briar as a shield against questions she didn’t want to answer yet. She knew it was cowardly. She didn’t care.

Tris managed to use Briar as a shield against questions she didn’t want to answer yet. She knew it was cowardly. She didn’t care. When Lisse came up to her to return her friend’s veil and pins, Tris sent her to fetch the rest of Briar’s clothes from her room and follow them. When Dita Batnose appeared, looking startled and harried, surrounded by students who had flocked out of her lecture to see what the commotion was about, Tris all but ordered the older woman to find Dedicate Crane in the library and tell him Briar was being taken to the Healer’s College. She trusted the lecturer would fill in enough other details as necessary.

Two healers carried Briar on a stretcher. The third held Briar’s wrist in her hand, trotting alongside. Tris kept pace on the other side of the stretcher.

“Weren’t his tattoos different a few days ago?” the healer holding Briar’s wrist examined the back of his hand curiously.

“They change,” Tris said shortly, clutching her veil in a sweaty hand as she jogged with them. One loose hank of red hair, completely spent of power, kept falling across her forehead. The untamed hair flapped across her face despite increasingly frustrated attempts to clear her vision.

“Do you know what’s wrong with him?” the healer asked.

“He fainted,” Tris said, hoping she sounded tired rather than waspish.

The healer’s judgment was: “You should exercise more.”

Tris didn’t bother answering.

Once at the healer’s college, the healers installed Briar in a room with a curtain over the door, excluding Tris while he was stripped of his wet clothing and examined. A student emerged from the curtained off room with an apparently heavy bucket full of Briar’s wet things clutched to his chest. “Do you happen to know how he got so wet?”

“Maybe it was wet up on the roof?” Tris offered, rather than suggest that a water goddess might be to blame.

The young man looked down at the heavy bucket. “Do you want it?” he asked Tris hopefully.

“I’ll take care of it,” she assured him.

A moment later, the curtain was swept aside. “You can go in now,” the last one murmured to her as the healing mages swept past.

Briar was still unconscious, but he looked warmer wrapped in blankets. His hair was still wet, reminding Tris forcibly of Glassmane’s appearance yesterday. Her heart twisted at the thought. She left the sloshing bucket in the corner of the room and sat on the low wooden stool that was the room’s only chair.

Lisse arrived first, the rest of Briar’s clothes in a bundle. “I didn’t bring any of the the weapons. I didn’t know if they were his or not. I shoved them under your bed. You’re not supposed to bring weapons into a place of healing,” Lisse insisted, more subdued than Tris had ever heard her.

“Thank you.” Tris had pinned her loose hair in a coil to keep it out of her face, but her veil was still sitting in her lap, the pins neatly piercing one corner so they wouldn’t get lost. “I’ll take those.” She reached for the clothes without really seeing the other girl. All she could keep thinking about was Briar’s comment that one night Rosethorn had fallen asleep and hadn’t woken up.

“What did you do to get to the roof?” Lisse asked. Without waiting for the answer, she kept talking. “People are saying you’re really his sister. People are saying you’re a powerful mage already. People are saying that you’re here to spy on us. People are saying you’re an assassin. People are saying you’re a murderer hiding from the law. People are saying a whole lot of really horrible things about you, Ana, and I’m afraid it’s all my fault.” The girl burst into loud tears, which surprised Tris enough that she got up and, keeping the bundle of Briar’s clothes tucked under one arm, reached out to hug her dorm-sister with the other.

“It’s not your fault,” Tris whispered. “I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you. I’m so sorry, Lisse.”

When Dedicate Crane arrived, with Batnose at his heels, Lisse stepped away from Tris, sniffed and wiped her eyes with her fingers.

“I’ve talked to the healers, and they say they can find nothing wrong with him. But he’s clearly unconscious!” Crane was scowling.

Lisse sniffed again. “Shock?” she supplied hesitantly. “Shock will sometimes do that. You just need to keep the patient warm and watch them. If there’s nothing else wrong, he should wake up soon.”

Dedicate Crane shared a worried look with Tris. “Thank you, miss.”

“Lisse, would you go back to the dorm and tell the rest of the girls I’m all right, and reassure them I’m not any sort of threat?” Tris was more concerned about sending Lisse back to the support of the sisterhood than any real belief she could rehabilitate her reputation. She tried to smile reassuringly at Lisse, but got another sudden squeeze in response.

“I knew you couldn’t be a murderer,” Lisse insisted. Tris felt a twinge of guilt. She may never have stood trial, but she would always have the deaths of innocents on her conscience. But as usual, complete honesty would have been a very bad idea at this point.

“Go, Lisse. I’ll be fine here,” Tris encouraged her. Lisse nodded and left the small room, drawing the curtain closed behind her in an automatic gesture.

“So what happened?” Crane asked Tris.

Tris explained as best she could about approaching the dormitory to find Briar on the roof. “I still have no idea how he got up there,” she editorialized with literal truth. She had theories though that she was unwilling to share in front of Batnose.

As if aware she needed an excuse to stay, Dita Batnose took the bundle of Briar’s clothing from Tris’ unresisting hands and began, methodically, to fold items and place them neatly out of the way on the broad sill of the room’s only window

Tris explained calmly what she had done, the danger she had seen Briar in and the effort she’d made to clear the area to prevent anyone else from getting hurt. She gave details about how she’d drawn wind power to raise herself on a platform to reach him and bring him down again. “He got onto the platform himself, and was conscious the entire ride down. He didn’t faint until he knew we were safely on the ground.” Again, this was technically true, but incomplete.

“So what do you think is wrong with him?” Batnose asked, the note Tris had written for Briar that morning crinkling in her clenched hand. “T. For Trisana, isn’t it? You’re the weather witch of the four, right?” It wasn’t really a question.

Tris closed her eyes. For all that she had postponed this moment, she always knew it would come eventually. “Yes. My name is Trisana Chandler and I’m an ambient weather mage.” She pulled her mage’s medallion out from under her dress, unfastened the delicate chain and handed it to Batnose. The medallions she and Briar wore had magic on them so that you wouldn’t notice them generally. “I received my medallion from Winding Circle Temple in Emelan.”

Dita Batnose examined the medallion, sniffed, and handed the medallion back to Tris. “The Arch-chancellor is certainly going to want to hear more about this!” she warned.

“The Arch-chancellor knows I’m here,” Tris said tiredly, fastening the chain behind her head and tucking the medallion under her clothes once more. “My teacher arranged it so that I could study academic magic under an assumed name. I didn’t want to be treated any differently from the other students.”

“Got tired of the limits of ambient magic?” Batnose asked. “Well, I have no problem with that, but you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do when the Arch-chancellor’s people make their queries. It is strictly against policy to undertake major magical workings on University grounds without permission and oversight.”

Tris didn’t bother answering Batnose. She knew that policy only meant that if they wanted an excuse to get rid of her, they now had one. She sat on the edge of Briar’s bed and fished his hand out from under the blankets. His tattoos were filling in. As the vining leaves waved under Tris’ gentle touch, she watched water droplets shake from the points and spines of his greenery. That was new. She’d never seen his tattoos do that before.

“I think you are being unfair,” Dedicate Crane insisted. “She has said that she has met with jealousy from academic mages in the community, but I thought she was overstating the case. If anything, she has been too kind. It sounds like she did everything necessary to protect innocent bystanders and provide emergency assistance to a fellow mage. What would you have had her do? Wait and watch while her foster brother fell to his death? Her actions may have saved his life!”

“At what cost?” Batnose fought back. “He is unconscious! How do we know she didn’t do this? And I don’t know what kind of brother he is to her, but if you ask me, they’ve been looking very cozy together these last few days…”

Dedicate Crane was shocked. “That is a vicious, small-minded and petty insinuation! I am appalled!”

Tris looked to the corner of the room, where a bucket filled with Briar’s clothing had sloshed when she carried it.

Batnose looked down her aquiline nose at the yellow-robed dedicate. “I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking it. How can we trust anything this girl says now that we know she’s been lying to us from the start?”

Tris looked up to find Dedicate Crane and Dita Batnose both looking at her, Crane with sympathetic frustration and Batnose with that anxious fear Tris had seen all too often in the eyes of other mages. “Have either of you been to Nepeta’s work room yet today?” she asked.

Crane looked confused. “No, I haven’t…”

Batnose looked smug. “As a matter of fact, I have. I spent the morning there with Glassmane and Professor Nepeta, wondering why none of you ambient mages had bothered to show up to a meeting _you_ scheduled.” Her triumphant smile was not lost on Dedicate Crane, who admitted the point with a sour look of his own.

“Did you notice any change to the water we collected from the skylight?” Tris asked.

An expression crossed Batnose’s face. Something must have happened to it, Tris thought. Batnose schooled her features again. “Why should I tell you?”

“No reason,” Tris admitted. Her temper, held too long under check, finally gave way. “Though I have yet to hear any thanks for saving your life yesterday. I haven’t seen Glassmane since the accident, but I’m sure he’ll be appropriately grateful when I remind him who prevented him from cracking his head open on Nepeta’s basement floor. He’s always been very kind to me.” Tris smiled knowingly at the other woman.

Dita Batnose snapped. “Why, you little…!” Abruptly, the lecturer turned on her heel and marched out of the room.

Panting with fury, Tris paced to the window and glared out. She saw nothing but a peaceful view of the town at the bottom of University Hill. It did nothing to soothe her temper. She took the pins out of her veil and wrapped it around her hair once more, securing it in place. Between Sandry’s magic woven into the veil and Daja’s magic in the pins, it would cover Tris’ hair and protect others from accidentally hurting themselves if they tried to touch her if she was ever knocked unconscious.

“Do you think provoking her like that was wise?” Dedicate Crane asked.

“No. That was definitely a mistake,” Tris admitted. “But I’m finding it hard to care right now. I need to go see Nepeta’s work room for myself, I think.”

“I’ll go with you,” Crane said.

Tris shook her head. “No, someone needs to stay with Briar. And… this may sound strange, but can you keep anyone from disturbing that bucket in the corner? It might be important.”

Crane nodded. “Is the water holding some magic?”

“Maybe,” Tris temporized. “It might also be holy.”


	29. Chapter 29

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The enormous wooden tub was perfect for soaking, Briar thought contentedly. It was the perfect antidote to his morning’s fright.

The enormous wooden tub was perfect for soaking, Briar thought contentedly. The water was at just the right temperature. Moisture loving plants overhanging the spot trailed their tendrils across the surface languidly, shading him from curious eyes and protecting him from the slight breezes that rustled them from time to time. It was the perfect antidote to his morning’s fright.

Bubbles escaped the surface at the far end of the tub. A woman emerged from the water with a vigorous splash, shaking drops from her sodden curls. She grinned at Briar. “This is nice, too.”

Briar noticed she was wearing his shirt. The wet fabric was nearly transparent, clinging to her small, high breasts. Briar coughed to cover the fact that he’d been staring, and searched for another place to put his eyes. He was glad the water hid the rest of him. He hoped Tris wasn’t going to be a jealous lover. That could get very awkward, given she could see and hear nearly anything on the wind if she concentrated on it.

“So, have you given it any more thought?” the young goddess asked.

“Given what thought?” Briar asked.

“What do you think my name is, silly!” She flicked her fingers at him, sprinkling water in his face.

He really had no idea. “Uh… “

New fingers trailed in the water beside Briar. “This is nice.” Rosethorn stood at his elbow, leaning against the outside edge of the tub. She was wearing a bathrobe. She appraised Briar and then the goddess through her third eye. “You do get around, don’t you?”

“I have a weakness for beauty,” Briar admitted.

“Your weakness seems very strong.” Rosethorn’s voice was wry, but not disapproving.

“What are you talking about?” the goddess interrupted, standing up in the tub to wade closer to their conversation. Her flesh wobbled gently in places the fascinated Briar. The teasing play of skin alternately visible and invisible through the wet fabric mesmerized him.

“You probably won’t get much sense out of him now,” Rosethorn informed the water goddess.

“Why not?” The hem of Briar’s shirt flapped on the little wavelets caused by the water goddess’ impatient bounce.

Briar thought how simple it would be to reach for her, run his hand up the back of her warm, naked thigh and explore the curve just hidden by the hem of his shirt. She was so close. If she stretched her hands over her head, his shirt would ride up that thigh to expose…

“You mortals are so strange!” Fortunately for Briar’s self-control, the young woman turned away and flounced off in a huff. The tub extended with her. It lengthened, stretching out toward the horizon. When she had gone far enough, she took a deep breath and sank into the water, out of view. The water went with her in a long, booming rush that roared like Tris’ anger.

Briar was sitting on the edge of the dormitory roof again, naked but for a cheap, scratchy blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He heard the jingling of a dozen bracelets as the goddess slid from the ridge of the roof to sit next to him again. She was still wearing his shirt. The cold air caused a ripple of gooseflesh on her arms. In sympathy (and nothing more, he argued to himself) Briar put one blanket-wrapped arm around her. She shifted to take advantage of his body heat. Through the wet shirt, Briar could feel the hard pebble of one of her nipples pressing into his ribcage.

“Now you’re paying attention to me again,” the goddess said with a note of satisfaction. “So, what do you think my name is?”


	30. Chapter 30

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A door at the far end of the basement was open, with light shining within. Curiously, hoping perhaps she might find another clue connecting the skylight’s disappearance with Briar’s water goddess, Tris peeked in.

Professor Nepeta blinked a couple times when Tris arrived, but made no objection to inviting her in. He had neatly stacked the twisted remains of the tub in one corner of his workroom. The pieces looked like they had been touched by something Briar might have done, fresh leaves sprouting from the broken wood. She saw no signs of water puddling anywhere. She thanked the professor for his time before leaving.

A door at the far end of the basement was open, with light shining within. Curiously, hoping perhaps she might find another clue connecting the skylight’s disappearance with Briar’s water goddess, Tris peeked in.

The basement office resembled the study room in the library where she met with her dorm sisters after Ancient Runes, but it had no window. Charged glow stones set on a high shelf provided the illumination. A stack of chairs in various states of disrepair were shoved against one wall. Boxes and dusty cobwebs decorated one corner. Behind the large central table, Lecturer Glassmane sat, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows and a mud-spattered apron over the rest of his clothes. On the table before him was a mess. Clay coated fingers poked and twisted at a complicated structure.

“Come on in.”

Tris took a step inside the room. “What are you doing?”

Glassmane didn’t look at her. He frowned at the work in front of him. “I’m trying to recreate the memory charm the skylight was holding. It took Ishabal Ladyhammer probably six weeks to replicate this thing, and she had the charm right in front of her to look at whenever she needed to compare her work to it. I’m trying to work from… hah! memory.”

“What does it do?” Her curiosity was on fire. It was the most complicated charm she’d ever seen. Glassmane was building in three dimensions an ornate creation of curving lines and swoops. Tris saw neither complete circles, squares or triangles anywhere in it. Her eyes had trouble focusing on it clearly… or perhaps her eyesight was fine and it was her brain that could not absorb the shape properly.

“Remember when I told you that some charms work in four dimensions? This is one of them.” Tris noticed now that Glassmane had anchored the base of the clay to a flat piece of wood. “It’s essentially a spiral. When completed, this charm can do two things. Turn it one way, and you can sharpen thoughts,” He twisted the base in one direction. “Even recall memories long past and hidden from someone’s conscious mind.” After a pause, he twisted it in the opposite direction. “Alternately, you can turn it the other way and cloud memories. Turn it a little and you just soften a memory, make something painful a little less so. Turn it a lot and you can all but erase events from a mind entirely.”

There was a stool just inside the door. Tris dragged it over and sat so she could examine the work at eye-level.

“Interested?” Glassmane asked quietly.

“Very much so,” Tris breathed. The possibilities of this charm were incredible, in both applications. Having just come from the healer’s college, Tris thought of the many soldiers who had come into the Winding Circle infirmary with their minds as battered as their bodies. Though the healers did what they could, sometimes the mental trauma was too much to overcome. Their bodies were healing, but their minds hadn’t the strength to fight that battle on two fronts. To be able to dull the memory until their bodies recovered, and then sharpen it again when they had the strength to confront their demons… what a gift that could be! “And this was in the skylight?” An exciting possibility occurred to Tris. Perhaps this was the key to restoring Rosethorn and Briar?

“Oh, yes. Pure power.  Fully functioning and perfectly suspended in the water. I barely touched it and it spun. All my lost memories returned to me at once.” His voice was low and contained an undertone of some dark emotion.

Tris looked at him. “And that’s why you fainted?”

“Do you want me to teach it to you?”

Tris saw something very unpleasant cross Lecturer Glassmane’s expression.

He continued, “If you had this power, what would you do with it? Would you trace it three stories high in fire and spin it so that the entirety of Lightsbridge forgot Ana Cheeseman? …or would you make them forget Trisana Chandler?”

The light was behind Glassmane. His face was shadowed, but his eyes were burning sparks.

“Ah. Batnose was here.” Tris knew her outburst of temper was likely to come back and bite her eventually. She’d had no idea how badly this particular bite would hurt. Tris swallowed the tears that threatened. They were a solid lump in her throat.

“You remind me of her, you know,” Glassmane said, suddenly smashing all the wet clay down into a pancake, the delicate curls and sinuous twists of the charm obliterated. “Not Dita, I mean. Ishabal Ladyhammer. She was intelligent, like you, sharply so. So sharp it hurt. And she was controlled. Nothing seemed to faze her. Just like you. But what I remember most now about Ladyhammer was how casually she used her power. You want some wards? Blink and Ladyhammer had raised them. Nobody could smash through. And we tried. She scolded us for being irritants, for not respecting the work. She said if we were real mages, we’d be able to get through them. She laughed at us. But she didn’t do anything else. She didn’t need to. Her shields were impenetrable.”

Feeling like she ought to say something, Tris wasn’t sure what, so she sat silent and listened.

“It was my second year at Lightsbridge. My friend Fridus and I were bored one afternoon. He had the brilliant idea of sneaking us into one of Ladyhammer’s lectures. We had this competition going in our dormitory. Each lecture we could sneak into that we weren’t supposed to be at earned us a number of points. Ladyhammer was worth a lot because she was famous, and her patron was powerful. For some reason attending the classes we’d actually signed up for gained us no points under this system.” Glassmane’s mouth twisted. “Students,” he muttered sourly. He folded up the edges of the clay and smushed it down again, further obliterating the pattern he’d been working on.

“Ladyhammer was already a fixture of the Namornese court at this time, but the rumors were that she had fallen from favor and was searching desperately for some way to restore herself to the good graces of the Empress.” He lifted the slab of clay and smashed it sideways onto the table. “When the lecture ended, she pointed to seven of us in the audience. Just pointed: you, you, you, you, you, you, you. I don’t know why us. Maybe it was random. She dismissed everyone else and the seven of us stayed in our seats. Of course now, it’s obvious she must have laid a powerful geas on us. We followed her here, to this basement, where she’d claimed work rooms. Then she gave us tasks. She never asked us. Just ordered. I’m sure at first we’d all have agreed to help if she had asked. It didn’t sound difficult. She had us fetch various books for her, run errands, file paperwork with the chancellor’s office. I wanted to brag that we were Ishabal Ladyhammer’s favorites, but she didn’t want us talking about her, or the work.”

“And so we didn’t. She ordered us not to talk about her and we didn’t. We lied to our friends. We made up stupid excuses about what we were doing with our time. Or at least my excuses were stupid. Fridus thought I was mad at him. Ironically, I remember now that Dita started chasing me, once she was convinced I’d found someone else and my attention was no longer entirely focused on her. But the work got more intense and none of us had any time for friendship or romance… or sleep.” Glassmane pounded the clay some more. “One of the other students said something that had attracted too much attention, so Ladyhammer placed magic barriers on the basement so we couldn’t get out. After a week of missing classes, no food, no sleep, just Ladyhammer’s work, I started hallucinating. Movement out of the corner of my eye started looking like something was there, but if I turned my head, I saw nothing. The faces of the people around me started looking different, alien, strange. They were the faces I knew, but somehow they were different. I don’t know if I can explain it. It was a bit like dreaming while still awake.”

Tris thought maybe she did know what he meant. His face now seemed so alien to her, lost in the story he was telling. He must have been about her age when this happened. “What happened?”

Glassmane scowled at her. “This happened.” He lifted the slab of clay and smashed it on its end again, folding and pounding the mass again with the heel of his hand. “She finally mastered this complicated charm of memory. I was alone in one of the other rooms when she came to me. She said she wanted to show me something. She brought out the charm. She explained to me what it did. I think she was practicing her speech for the Empress, knowing I wouldn’t remember a thing about it when she was done. Then she held it between her hands and blew on it, gently, to start it spinning. She forced a connection to my mind and swept everything she wanted me to forget into the path of the charm. She took six weeks of my life and left me with… almost nothing in return.”

He pushed his thumb into the clay six times. “When I woke up, I was at the healer’s college. I had been withdrawn from all my classes. On my class record I had a new item though: “Work Project: Ishabal Ladyhammer”. The healers explained to me that I’d suffered backlash from overextending myself. I could barely remember Ladyhammer, though I did remember the lecture she had given, the one I’d snuck into. She said that sometimes the only difference between a curse and a blessing was in how it was applied.”

“When I get a student like you, so hungry for learning, so eager to do well, it always feels like a blessing. I was so glad when you finally made that ‘mistake’ of yours. I’d been eagerly waiting for an excuse to talk to you, but, like Ladyhammer, you are so very careful, so very controlled. I thought I was going to show you how to shape that amazing power of yours and you were going to go out into the world and make me so very proud. People were going to point me out as your teacher.” Glassmane grimaced. “But now I feel like I’ve been cursed. All that work must have meant nothing to you. I thought I really had something to teach you. But it was all a lie, wasn’t it? You’re already a fully credentialed mage. I’m never going to be more than a footnote in your biography. You were probably laughing all along at what a pathetic excuse of a teacher I was, with my first year lectures and my simplistic examples.” He smashed the clay again.

“I don’t think that,” Tris said.

“Then what do you think?” His eyes were sullen on the clay in front of him.

Tris watched him for a moment. “If the only reason you wanted to teach me was to improve your professional reputation, you’re not the man I thought you were.”

“What do you know about it!” Glassmane shouted at her. “How dare you judge me for that! I’m not a fancy mage who calls lightning bolts from a clear blue sky as a calling card! I work hard and apply myself, but without the attention that comes with a brilliant student or a brilliant project, I’m going to be teaching first year students their basic charms for the rest of my life!”

“And what’s wrong with that?” Tris asked, feeling really annoyed now. “You seem to enjoy it. The students learn a lot from you. You’re improving lives, maybe not in a flashy way, but just as certainly and far more reliably than I may have ever done. It’s a good living and nothing to be ashamed of! It’s something I think I’d enjoy doing, actually.”

“Oh, would you? Are you going to take over for me? Take my job? I offered you a place as my assistant. Did you think I was just going to hand the reins of the class over to you and say, good luck, have fun, I’m off to grind some lenses…?” He struggled for a bit with what he wanted to say. “You took down Ishabal Ladyhammer! Do you have any idea how jealous I am of you?” Glassmane demanded, challenging her with a shout as he pushed himself to his feet, pounding the table.

It all came back to this again. “Yes,” Tris said tiredly. “Yes I do. You’re just like all the others. You see what I can do and all you feel is jealousy. You never see the things I can’t do. You never see the cost.”

“What can’t you do?” Glassmane challenged. “As far as I can see, you have so much power, so much control, you could do anything you wanted. Locking me in this basement and making me your slave would just be a start.” He moved around the table to face her directly. “Is that why you used a false name? Did you think people would feel more comfortable around you if they didn’t realize how powerful you were? Well, how did that work out for you? Because it's not working very well for me.  I feel like someone handed me a cursed relic to use as a paperweight and never bothered to mention that if I dropped it I would suffer unimaginable horrors for the rest of my short, miserable life.” He grabbed Tris by the shoulders and pulled her to face him straight on. When she frowned at him, Glassmane gripped harder, bringing his face right down into hers. “Am I frightening you? Am I making you angry? What happens if I make you really angry? Are you going to hurt me? If I give you a bad grade are you going to strike me with lightning?”

Tris brought her hands up between them and pushed at his chest. He was strong and she didn’t actually want to hurt him, so neither of them budged. She glared at him as fiercely as he glared at her. She would have warned him off with an electrical shock, but his jibe about lightning hit a little too close to home. All she could think about was Briar, shaking out his half-paralyzed arm after she’d accidentally shocked him, or when she'd met her student Kethlun, that look of horror on his face when he thought her lightning had interfered with the working of his brain again. “You look at me, you see what I can do, and all you can think of is how easy it is for me to destroy! What is it with you people? How much do you charge for assassination, Tris? Can you make it look like an accident, Tris? What would it take to get you to start a teeny tiny earthquake that demolishes my competitor’s warehouse, but keeps mine intact, Tris? Be a dear and flood that bridge out for me, Trisana darling! How many people can you kill in an afternoon Tris? Do it quickly and I’ll take you out for tea afterwards!” She shoved him again, her building anger giving her strength. Glassmane released her shoulders and stumbled, the backs of his thighs hitting the edge of the table.

“You told me to relax a little. You told me it was good to make mistakes.” She stepped in closer to him, shoving his shoulder with the palm of her hand to emphasize her point. Glassmane winced. “Yes, when I lose my temper, people get hurt. Sometimes they die. Is that what you want? Are you going to point me at Ishabal Ladyhammer like one of your charms, then apply just enough pressure to break me? Are you hoping I make a mistake big enough that the force of my backlash could take her out for you? That would certainly be a revenge.” Tris hissed her displeasure with that idea. “But I’m not going to let you use me like that.”

She continued: “I learned very early on that I needed to control my power. I learned discipline. And I learned it from the best. And now I work very, very hard not to make mistakes.” Tris leaned in, wanting to scare him now, wanting to hurt him as much as he’d hurt her. Her breath was coming fast and harsh. “But here you come, telling me mistakes are how we learn. So maybe I can be forgiven for making just a little mistake now?”

Something hovered between them, like a shimmer of heat in the air. They were barely inches apart. Glassmane tilted his head toward her, panting as his eyes darted over her face. They didn’t move for a long moment. Tris licked her lips, strangely focused on the man’s mouth, half opened and near enough to taste his breath.

Glassmane broke the tension, hands reaching out to her, then pulling back suddenly. He leaned away, trapping his hands under his own armpits and collapsing against the table with a shuddering sigh. “Lakik’s teeth,” he said, not quite able to meet her eyes. “What am I thinking?”

Tris wasn’t entirely sure what had just happened. “I don’t know,” she answered him breathlessly. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that if you’d touched me, that would have been one incredible mistake.”

Pressing her lips tightly together, Tris nodded. She turned and left without saying anything more. 


	31. Chapter 31

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It looked to be a travel journal. Given the hand-drawn maps in the first few pages, Dedicate Crane saw this must be an original manuscript.

Dedicate Crane sat in the stool next to Briar Moss’ sick bed, reading. Crane hated nursing. He’d never been any good at it. In a way, he was glad Briar was unconscious and all he had to do was listen to the young man breathe.

He wasn’t sure why he’d picked this particular volume from the library shelf, other than it was in the section about Gyongxe. It was an older work, in one of the plain, economical bindings that meant this was a book published by the Lightsbridge Library for the exclusive use of the University. These tended to be collections of notes, often worthless, or long papers from more famous (or infamous) alumni, often repetitive. This was neither. It looked to be a travel journal. Given the hand-drawn maps in the first few pages, Dedicate Crane saw this must be an original manuscript. The binding creaked as if he were the first person to crack it open in decades. But it had been in his hand when Lecturer Batnose had tracked him down to inform him of Briar’s misadventures. He supposed it was bad form to have tucked it in his sleeve without informing a librarian he was borrowing it, but Dedicate Crane valued books. He’d return it when he was done.

_When my father banished me, I set forth with no other company but my tutor and twelve stout men-at-arms, with instruction to seek my lost honor in some other gods-forsaken corner of the world. It amused me to set our course for Gyongxe, where it is said, the world comes closer to the realm of gods in those mountainous reaches than anywhere else on earth._

Crane skipped over several pages of lists detailing how the party was provisioned and resumed reading.

_When we arrived in Gyongxe, we were accosted by an old peasant woman who warned us our expedition was doomed to failure. There being a blessing upon Gyongxe, all who left its borders might remember those they met and where they stayed, but would not recall the gods themselves nor the everyday miracles commonly enjoyed by the general populace of peasants and temple functionaries._

He skimmed several pages of overblown description of the many gods this man had encountered and fought, and the many relics he had taken, occasionally by guile, but usually by force. Already, Crane did not like this man.  
  
_Having loaded the remaining horses with the harvest of our victory over the weak and foolish creatures of this mountainous country, my tutor, my men (somewhat reduced in number) and I resolved to return to some more civilized climate, whereby we might broker an exchange of our goods for a resupply and more men. I had determined that this would be but the start of many such lucrative expeditions, as I liked the feeling of this adventure and considered treasure-hunting a good occupation for my temperament and talents. However, I was as yet undecided whether to brave the effects of the rumored “blessing” in a crossing over the river that signalized the border between Gyongxe and the rest of the world._

_On one hand, it seemed it would be a relief that no longer would the great bone snakes emerge from their caverns to whisper my crimes to me, nor would the great spiders tempt their young to hassle me as we sought treasures in their dens. I had lost seven of my men-at-arms in expeditions of this nature, and the remainder refused to go on any more when they saw me toss one of their stupid fellows at the great spider queen in order to distract her once I had secured her gold._

_But the treasure of this place was too great, both material and magical. I wished to return, and I did not wish to make the mistakes of this first expedition a second time._

_We followed the river for some days, until we came to a place where the rocky terrain fell away in a steep drop. The river here became a great waterfall, rushing with such force over the rocks that local superstition worshipped the phenomenon as a goddess, and as is the way in Gyongxe, their superstition gave her life. The main temple was set a little way off the river, to avoid inundation by seasonal floods, one supposes. It held little of any virtue, but I did learn that the river here they called Dhara and the waterfall goddess bore the flattering epithet: handmaiden of the mirror._

_I learned why when I descended the steep cliff face. The Dhara here was not the muddy and meandering river it had been upstream. Some trick of the rocky approach allowed the water to capture the light in such a way as to provide a perfectly adequate reflective surface. It seemed this waterfall was mirror enough to reflect the sun’s life-giving rays into a deep river canyon. As a result, the terraced insides of this sheltered place all bore perfect, luxuriant specimens of lowland plants that otherwise were unknown in Gyongxe, being too fragile to withstand the harshness of the high air. Without the light reflected by the waterfall, this place would be too dim for any wholesome growth._

_I spoke to the caretaker of one of these small gardens, and he had an interesting confidence for me. He informed me that the gardens were not the direct result, but the indirect result of the virtue imbued by the handmaiden of the mirror. Those who were bold enough to face her in her grotto behind the waterfall would be tempted. She would appear as that which one desired most, whether lover, friend or fantasy. He had been successfully tempted by the lure of this garden filled with all that he desired. I at once resolved to confront this goddess myself._

Crane was hoping this would end badly for the bravo, but the existence of this book argued otherwise. He read on, fascinated almost despite himself.

_Since I desired nothing so much as to cross out of Gyongxe without being subject to the blessing which would hinder my memory and prevent me from making the best preparations for a return expedition, she came to me in the guise of my first teacher, a governess of stern and unlovable mien, who had taught me the rudiments of meditation and how to focus my will. She promised to teach me a charm that would counteract the Blessing of Gyongxe, but the effect would not be powerful enough to counteract it farther than the span of a man’s arm. But within that radius, it would give me the opportunity to maintain all my wits, even if I crossed out of Gyonxe._

_I asked what good would it be if I crossed out of Gyongxe only to forget my memory of meeting her and learning the charm? I refused her offer. She then offered me a second choice. She offered to create a working in stone, in perfect detail, of the shape I should create with my power. With this item in my possession, said she, I would be able to recall perfectly all that I needed to in order to work the spell beyond Gyongxe’s borders. This I accepted._

_She produced the item by wearing away a piece of the native stone with the force of the water’s fall. She held it to me, but I refused to take it before she demonstrated its efficacy. She spun the charm on its longitudinal axis. It seemed to draw back the pale curtain between myself and my early memories. Slights from my distant youth, long forgotten, sprang to the forefront of my consciousness. I remembered the face of my mother (or one whom I thought might be she, though it could also have been a wishful construct as I have nothing to compare it to) and promises broken over my baby head. I confess, it was as dizzying as it was edifying, for I relaxed my natural wariness to accept the stone token from my new patroness._

_That was the moment she informed me (and my memory being so preternaturally sharpened at that point, I recall it as if it happened only a heartbeat ago) that the price for my desire was to remain in her river canyon for the rest of my life. This, of course, I was loathe to do, so I immediately spun the charm in the opposite direction, as violently as I could, channeling it with my spell energies to strike the goddess herself, whose spirit I perceived to be not the old woman before me, but the water itself cascading from the rocks. The water forgot that it was water, and became like glass, and yet more resilient and flexible than glass. I cut a large sheet free of the immobilized goddess as a souvenir. It shall make an excellent window and conversation piece for my next home, so that I have a clear example of how I cleverly escaped the traps of these selfish gods by using their own tricks against them._

_Immediately, I called my men down to assist in packaging the relic for transport. We also found many fine items in the small temple behind the water fall which…_

Crane skipped the inventory. This was depressing.

_Though we could have followed the river out of Gyongxe from that point, I had two further matters to attend to. First, I practiced my new power on the denizens of the temple in order to cloud any memories of my passage. Secondly, I suggested to my tutor that since the goddess might at some point revive, we should bury what was left of her to slow her should she hold a grudge. He directed me in breaking up the rocks over the waterfall cavern, but left the final blows to me, as an exercise to practice my war magic._

_He seemed unusually nervous as the water found its new channel, sweeping into the river canyon and scouring it clean of what it formerly held. It was then my tutor confessed to me that while I had been negotiating with the goddess, he had been visited by a fearsome vision foretelling his doom, should he pass out of Gyongxe with me._

_I agreed that he should not tempt fate by returning to civilization in my party. I erased all I could of his memory, and sent him wandering, quite bereft of speech, in the wild lands of Gyongxe. May the gods have mercy on him. I certainly won’t if I see him again, the traitor._

_We passed over the river and out of Gyongxe that night. My thoughts felt only slightly dulled, but I had written this account of my travels, so I was instantly reminded that the curious stone sculpture I held was the key to unlock the rest of my memories. And so I broke the blessing of Gyongxe on myself. And as my tutor, by his actions, had effectively declared me finished with his training, I claimed my right as a full mage and took my new name to be Blessingbroke._

The rest of the book was a catalog of items. The pictures were well drafted with a clear hand. The notes impeccable. Had it not come with the gruesome tale as prequel, Dedicate Crane would have given this mage high marks for his draughtsmanship skills and comprehensive and useful descriptions.

He leafed through the last pages hoping for some further clue as to the mage’s fate, but found nothing. The final item, of course, was a picture of the window made of water that had been a piece of a goddess in Gyongxe. Though only ink on paper, the mage had captured the essence of it perfectly. Crane wanted to cry for the desecration of the goddess, and again for their destruction of the window. Instead, Crane let himself weep for Rosethorn and for Briar. He could not see what good he could do either of them now.


	32. Chapter 32

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Tris returned to Briar’s bedside, it was evening.

When Tris returned to Briar’s bedside, it was evening. The healers had just finished checking on Briar, and had left two lamps lit. Tris was wearing a fresh change of clothes. She brought Dedicate Crane some bread stuffed with meat filling. “They also have soup heating if you ask the matron nicely,” Tris informed Crane.

“No, this is enough.” He ate the food mechanically. “Are you all right?”

She stared out the window. “I will be. I regret… my temper got the better of me. I shouldn’t have said what I did to the lecturer. I try not to lash out like that, but…” Tris turned to watch Briar sleep. “What if something worse had happened to him?” She went to sit on the edge of his bed and patted his leg through the blankets, reassuring herself he was still there. “Any change?” she asked.

“No change,” Crane told her. “Though, while you were out, I read the most depressing book. I hesitate to recommend it on its own merits, but I think you should read it too.”

“Can you summarize it for me?” Tris asked.

Dedicate Crane rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. “I can try. But I might leave something out. In precis, there was a mage. He eventually took the name Blessingbroke.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Tris commented.

“He traveled to Gyongxe, looted temples, terrorized innocents, and returned to what he called more civilized lands entirely unscathed. It’s enough to make me lose faith entirely.”

“So, I should read it why…?”

“He does mention bone snakes, and describes in passing several encounters with giant spiders. What is most interesting though is that he is told early on that there is a blessing on Gyongxe that prevents anyone who has been there from remembering the many supernatural elements of their visit once they have passed out of Gyongxe’s borders.” Dedicate Crane finished the bread and wiped crumbs from his fingers with a handkerchief he pulled out of his sleeve. “He gets around this partially by writing everything he thinks relevant into his journal. In particular, he relates the story of an encounter with a goddess. He doesn’t speak in metaphor. He’s very casual about it with enough mundane details that it doesn’t sound like a dream or a vision. He goes to this waterfall and there’s a goddess who offers him his heart’s desire.”

Suddenly, Tris seemed very interested. “Go on.”

“The goddess appears to him looking like a former teacher, but the mage senses her power emanating from the waterfall. She offers to teach him a charm that will help him bypass the memory erasing effects of leaving Gyongxe.”

“A spiral-worked charm that either sharpens or clouds the memory depending on which way it spins?” Tris asked quickly.

“Is it spiral shaped? The book did not say,” Crane affirmed the rest with a nod. “He uses it to make the goddess forget she is a waterfall, and she is frozen solid.”

“She turns into ice?” Tris asked.

“No. Immobilized into a solid form. Like the pane of a window.” Crane flipped to the end of the book and handed it to Tris.

“The skylight.” She held on to the book. “Yes, maybe I should read it before… “ Tris bit her lip. “Did he at any point mention the name of this goddess?”

Crane frowned. “Dhara? Mmm… no. That was the name of the river. The waterfall goddess was referred to as ‘the handmaiden of the mirror’ and the metaphor was that she reflects what you desire. I don’t remember her being given any other name.” He peered at Tris in the lamplight. “You know something more.”

“I have a suspicion,” Tris admitted. “I think Briar and Rosethorn are being affected by something like this 'Blessing of Gyongxe.' They were in Gyongxe, after all, and have said nothing about gods or supernatural events there, which if your reading of this book is to be believed, there’s a god under every woodpile there. Though, to be fair, neither of them talk about Gyongxe all that much. What if… if there was a god of Gyongxe that was here with us now and that whenever he sees her, Briar loses his memory of the event?”

“The skylight?” Crane confirmed. When Tris nodded, he asked, “But what about Rosethorn?”

“Have there been any new visitors to Winding Circle since I’ve been gone?” Tris asked. “Anyone with a particular tie to a religion practiced in Gyongxe?”

“The Living Circle’s mother temple is in Gyongxe. Rosethorn would hardly have to go far to find someone associated with a religion practiced in Gyongxe,” Dedicate Crane observed.

“Ah. I had forgotten. Good point.” Tris hefted the slim book. “If you need to stretch your legs, why don’t you go do that now? I’m going to skim through this, but when you return I’d like your help trying something with Briar.”

“Will it be dangerous to you?” Dedicate Crane asked suspiciously.

Tris considered it. “I shouldn’t think so. But I’d like someone here to… well, just in case.”

When Crane returned, Tris found it difficult to get comfortable in the bed with Briar. His unconscious body was limp and heavy. It was difficult finding enough space for her backside between Briar and the wall without curling around his head so as to smother him or moving so far to the foot of the bed, her head was resting even with his hip bones. Eventually, Dedicate Crane pointed out that they could hardly harm him by shifting him to one side of the bed to give her more room. The worst they could do was wake him, and in that event they might be able to get answers out of him.

They found it easier to pull than to push, so Tris ended up spooning behind Briar in the narrow bed, her back pressed against the wall.

“If he weren’t your brother, I might be feeling rather uncomfortable about this,” Dedicate Crane admitted. “But I know your intentions are pure.”

Tris preferred not to even attempt a plausible lie to reassure him. She just closed her eyes and laid her head on the pillow. At first, Briar’s hair flopped in her face. She brushed it away from where it tickled her eyes and nose and tried relaxing again. Then she developed a sudden overwhelming itch on her ankle. She scratched it with her other foot. She couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d read. The waterfall goddess, the memory charm and the implications of Gyongxe’s blessing all whirled around in her brain, as she tried to fit them together into a solution for Briar and Rosethorn’s current dilemma. She still felt like there was a piece missing. “This is worse than the first time I tried meditating,” Tris muttered.

“Why don’t you do that?” Dedicate Crane suggested. “Try meditating?”

“Because I don’t fall asleep when I’m meditating. I practice meditation a lot for the express purpose of training myself not to fall asleep while I’m meditating. And I need to fall asleep if this is going to work.”

“Use your connection with Briar to share his sleep?”

“I suppose it’s worth a try.” Tris forced her body to relax. She reached for Briar’s mind, but found it difficult to connect with, as she had when he was up on the roof. He was there in outline, but not in substance. What was she doing wrong? It had been so easy to share his dreams before!

Shifting her position relative to Briar, Tris rolled him onto his back. She pulled the blanket down to his waist and rested her cheek on his bare chest. Like the decorations on his hands, the markings on Briar’s chest had filled in. The leaves were little hearts, but there were so, so many of them sprouting from a stout looking tree. Tris saw one leaf that looked like a jagged rose-leaf, larger than the rest. It was clear Briar’s love for Rosethorn was profound. Tris traced the other leaves with the pads of her fingers, trying to decide who they represented. She saw Briar’s student Evvy, a leaf that looked almost like it was carved of stone. She saw an elegant leaf like one from the living metal tree Daja had created. She saw an adorable leaf, embroidered spine and edges clearly indicating Sandry. She saw herself, a scarred leaf like a lightning struck cloud, that looked as much at home on this plant as any of the others. She saw so many more leaves, more than she could count. All rustled together as one thing in Briar’s heart. He had so much love there.

She placed her palm flat on Briar’s chest. Her hand looked tiny against that mass of leaves. Tris closed her eyes. She had never really wanted to be queen of his heart. That would have been too much responsibility for his happiness. Tris had just wanted a safe place to rest, a place where she couldn’t hurt anyone. That great tree looked like it could take anything she could throw at it. She could give it all kinds of weather, and her rain and wind would only root it more strongly. And it would always be right here for her to lean against when she grew too tired.

Tris was glad she was a part of his life. She couldn’t have hoped for more, really. She relaxed against him and allowed herself to sleep.


	33. Chapter 33

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rosethorn made herself try, when she could remember, to find a familiar place and anchor there for a while.

As entertaining as it could be to explore the endless caverns of these dreams, Rosethorn made herself try, when she could remember, to find a familiar place and anchor there for a while. She wondered, as she sat between rows of cucumber plants in her garden at Discipline Cottage, how her body was doing and how Lark was bearing up under what must be incredible strain. To be honest, it was difficult thinking about details of her waking life. It was like trying to recall a dream, sometimes, but Rosethorn persisted.

As if summoned by her thoughts, a goddess wearing Lark’s body came out of the cottage to meet her. She wore straw sandals and on her hair was a braid of ripe wheat, though according to these cucumbers, the wheat should still be green. “Hello, Mila.”

“How are you doing, Rosethorn?” Mila of the Grain asked her dedicate daughter as she came to sit cross legged next to her.

Rosethorn reflected on this question. “I hate grieving my loved ones like this, but if it’s my time to die, you know I’ve made my peace about that. Briar, on the other hand… I’m worried about him Mila. Who is this little goddess who keeps following him around? Is he spontaneously developing a vocation? I’ve never known him to be so inclined before.”

“Your children really do love you, Rosethorn. You think they wouldn’t court all sorts of gods if it would give them a chance of saving your life?” Mila reached over to pat Rosethorn’s knee. “Your friends, too, especially Asaia’s boy. He’s been praying for you, day and night.”

“Who? Crane?” Rosethorn wasn’t surprised by this, but she was surprised Mila had mentioned him specifically. “That’s nice, I suppose.”

“Nice?” Mila frowned with Lark’s face. “Just because he’s uninterested in your body, doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you just as much as your sister Lark does.”

“I know that, but…” Rosethorn tried to work through what she wanted to say. “I’m just not sure what he thinks Asaia can do for me?”

Mila laughed. “You should know that prayer is not about thinking. Prayer is about asking. Sometimes asking the question helps you figure out what the answer needs to look like. He doesn’t know what Asaia can do for you. But he knows he needs to ask for help if there’s any chance of getting help.”

Rosethorn looked on the face of her goddess. “Are you trying to tell me something? Haven’t I already asked for your help getting out of this mess? A hundred times at least!”

With a knowing little smile still on her lips, Mila leaned over and kissed Rosethorn sweetly. “You’re mine. You always will be. And I know you love me and will always return to me. But don’t be afraid to ask for help from others who might be willing to give it.”

“Who?” Rosethorn asked the blue and empty sky.

When she heard no answer, Rosethorn got up, dusted the seat of her pants and started walking. The landscape would change eventually. It always did, here. She didn’t expect stone floors and whitewashed walls to surround her so quickly. She recognized one of the buildings at Lightsbridge University. That brought back memories. As if summoned by the memory, she saw Crane sitting on a low stool by lamplight, watching over an empty bed. An empty bucket sat at his feet.

“Thank you for your prayers, Crane. I love you, too.” Rosethorn patted the man on the shoulder, but he didn’t flinch or take notice in any way.

Rosethorn left him there and kept walking. She heard looms rattling and cracking in the distance. She followed the sound to where the spiders were, feeding their silk into the great machines, weaving the veil that separated her from the waking world. Small spiders chittered at her as she approached. She petted them familiarly, finding grubs in her pockets to feed to the young spinners. One of the mother spiders made noises at her. “I know I don’t have to treat them, but I like to.”

Turning her feet away from the great spiders and their machines, Rosethorn followed the veil. She trailed a hand along the soft stuff, watching it ripple where it puddled against the ground. Looking up, the barrier stretched as far as she could see. She had never managed to follow it this far along its length before. Something always distracted her. Briar would fall asleep and the gravity of his dreams would pull her away and into his imaginings. But he seemed entirely occupied with his little goddess at the moment. She kept walking, her footsteps echoing in the great stone chamber.

Rosethorn stopped. The footsteps echoed another two paces then stopped as well. Rosethorn started walking again, her feet now booted and ringing hard against the stone floor. She stopped. The footsteps echoed another three paces, then silence. Rosethorn stood on one foot to remove a boot. She walked like that, one soft step, one loud step, and noticed it took five paces before the echo caught up to her. Rosethorn whirled around to find a strange gentleman behind her.

His hair was the pale color of the veil between the worlds. His skin was as dark as the dirt she loved to dig her fingers into. When he smiled, Rosethorn could see the black pips etched into his large white teeth. She swore: “Lakik’s teeth!”

Lakik’s grin grew wider. “Oh, good! I thought this was going to be awkward, but now it feels like we’ve already been introduced and we’re going to be the very best of friends.” Lakik took Rosethorn’s arm in his. “And now, because we’re such good friends, I was hoping you’d be willing to do a teeny, tiny little favor for me?”

Rosethorn pulled her arm free of the god’s. “What?” she asked suspiciously. She brushed the bottom of her foot with her hand before pulling her second boot back on.

“Well, there’s this party, you see, and technically speaking I wasn’t invited.” Lakik waved his hands as if to indicate that such technicalities weren’t really to be bothered with. “I mean, I suppose I could just crash it, but that seems so… inelegant somehow.”

“What am I supposed to do about this?” Rosethorn asked.

“Ah, well, you see, my very sharpest of thorns, this is a party you are invited to. So I was wondering…” Lakik scratched the back of his head in mock embarrassment, toeing the ground in an exaggerated show of shyness, “…could I come as your date?”

Rosethorn squinted at the god. “Is this some sort of trick?”

Lakik beamed. “Yes!” he said proudly. “You are so sharp, my little thorn! You know I like the prickly ones best. Ask me another one?”

Rosethorn considered. “Can you help return Briar to his senses?”

Lakik raised his eyebrows, worked his mouth and spat on the ground. Three dice rolled to land as a six, a six and a two. Lakik gently nudged the two with his toe until six pips faced up. “I’d say the odds are good. You get one more question.”

Unable to suppress a slight smile (Rosethorn was always a bit of a sucker for a bad boy) she asked Lakik, “Would you be so kind as to be my date for this party?”

Feigning smug disinterest as he checked for dirt under his fingernails, Lakik muttered, “Oh, well, this is all so sudden… but since you asked so nicely…!” He darted in and kissed Rosethorn chastely on the cheek. “I accept.”

Rolling her eyes, she accepted Lakik’s offered arm. “But no funny business, or I’ll hang you upside down by your heels in my well.”

Lakik cuddled closer to the cranky dedicate. “Oooh! You talk sweet like a honeybee…”


	34. Chapter 34

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tris stood in the entryway of a grand house.

Tris stood in the entryway of a grand house. The floor was marble. The walls were wood covered in richly carved wood panels featuring little dancing figures, flowers and small animals. Candles in sconces glittered everywhere.

“Your things, miss?” The maid was the girl who had let her into the house Briar and Crane were staying at. She offered Tris a great-beaked mask and a cape covered with copper feathers that chimed when it moved.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize this was a fancy dress ball,” Tris excused herself, looking at the finely crafted copper mask. She was sure Daja would have loved to see how it was put together.

“Would you like to wear these in?” the maid held out the edge of the cape for Tris to examine. Sandry would have spent hours peering at the close stitch work that attached the various feathers to the body of the garment.

Tris shook her head. “No, thank you. I don’t think it suits me. You won’t get into any trouble if I refuse?” she asked.

“Oh, no trouble, miss!” the maid assured her, eyes intently watching.

“Not today, then, thanks,” Tris murmured and brushed past her. Great double doors opened onto a huge cavern. The walls were rough reddish stone. Looking up, Tris saw the space was immense. She couldn’t even see the ceiling clearly.

Bisecting the room was a curtain. Stretching floor to ceiling and as far as Tris could see in either direction, it was woven of a creamy white fiber, almost like silk, but it held light within it. The glow from the curtain was the cavern’s only light. Looking around she didn’t see anybody. Wasn’t this supposed to be a party?

“Tris! You’re finally here!” Briar called to her across the sudden crowd, weaving his way through with his customary social grace. Tris was in awe of how he did this, bestowing smiles and gentle hand touches like vails, swimming through the sea of strange bodies until he reached her side. When he got close enough he put his arm around her and pulled her close. “There’s this girl. She keeps following me around. I mean, she’s sweet and sexy as anything, but I can’t shake the feeling that she’s just using me for something. I can’t really enjoy myself at this party if she’s constantly in my lap, touching me, warning everyone else off like she’s interested in me, but every time I make a move to get close, she pulls away.”

Frowning, Tris asked, “Briar, do you think I’m using you?”

Confused, Briar shook his head. “Of course not. And when I don’t answer your questions quickly enough you don’t try to drown me or throw me off a roof.” He reconsidered, then shook his head more firmly. “No, unless you had reason to do it, you would never throw me off a roof.”

“Pull you off one, maybe?” Tris agreed with a grin. Briar smiled at her meltingly.

“Briar!!!” Squealing with a voice that should have shattered every expensive wine glass in the room, a small, bouncy girl wearing nothing but a man’s white linen shirt, soaking wet, and a large number of bangles on both wrists and ankles, scampered up to the pair in conversation and wrapped her arms tightly around Briar. “Big sister is here! She’ll fix everything!” She gazed up into Briar’s face with rapt adoration.

A proud woman followed the damp girl, hawk bladed beak flanked by intelligent eyes. Her hair was a mass of dark curls, like a thundercloud looking for a field to rain on. Her cape rustled with thousands of paper feathers, razor cut and hand shaped to look like pale wings folded behind her. She stared at Tris, measuring her. Then she sighed. “Yes, I’ll help. But it’s so hard to think in this crowd. Let’s find someplace quieter to talk.”

Briar shook his admirer loose to follow the rustling cape of paper feathers. The nearly naked girl transferred her attention to Tris, taking the taller girl’s hand and squeezing it familiarly. “Everything is going to be all right now. You can trust her.”

“Can I?” Tris asked, feeling awkward and uncomfortable. The face behind the bird-beaked mask belonged to Dita Batnose.

A shelf of books attracted Tris, but the jingling water goddess pulled her to a study room where six chairs sat around a big rectangular table. One wall of the room was obscured, floor to ceiling, by the same glowing fabric that divided the cavern in two. The bird-beaked woman and the water goddess had already taken seats next to each other, their backs to the curtain. Briar and Tris sat opposite them. The four of them stared at each other for a long moment.

Tris finally broke the silence. “Well? What now?”

Behind Tris and Briar a door opened on hinges that creaked loudly. They turned to witness the arrival of two others.

“Rosethorn!” Briar greeted the woman with relief.

“You!” The hawk-beaked woman and Tris both stood and pointed at the other newcomer. They asked together in near-perfect synchrony, “What are you doing here?”

The tall pale-haired man who strode into the space grinned, showing off the dark spots on his white teeth. “The same thing you are, I imagine.” He tucked his hand familiarly into the crook of Rosethorn’s elbow and looked down his nose at the woman in the bird-mask. “I was invited,” he told her smugly.

“By whom?” the masked woman asked incredulously.

“Don’t you mean who?” the man quizzed her.

She shook her beaked mask after a moment’s thought. “No, if you may properly answer the question with “him” the question is “whom?” If you can answer the question with “he” the question is “who?” I am correct.”

The gentleman who’d asked for the clarification ignored it entirely, taking the opportunity to usher Rosethorn to the chair beside Briar and scooting around the table to introduce himself to the water goddess. “How do you do? My name’s Lakik. What’s yours?”

“I don’t know!” the water goddess confided. “Do you know my name?”

He took the girl’s small dark hand in his own large one and kissed the fingertips delicately. “I don’t know your name, but I’m sure it’s as lovely as you are.” She giggled, jewelry jingling, the curls bouncing around her ears splattering water droplets over everything.

“What do you know about it, Glassmane?” Tris accused across the table.

“Who’s Glassmane? Never heard of him,” Lakik answered quickly. “Besides, I haven’t talked to him in years. Not that I would, because I think I still owe him… never mind. What’s a little life debt between friends?”

“Augh!” the bird-masked woman cried. “Why did you have to come meddling in to it? This would have been trivial to remedy if your fellow hadn’t gone mucking about with my perfect plan! You’re always like this, Lakik. Why do you have to make things so complicated?” She folded her arms in disgust, the paper feathers rattling against each other like autumn leaves in a wind storm.

“Now, now, Asaia,” Lakik soothed, scooting behind the water goddess to place his hands on the bird-masked woman’s shoulders. “Don’t get your feathers all ruffled over this. I’ll make it up to you…” he offered.

Asaia Bird Winged glared down her beak at Lakik the Trickster. “No. You ‘making it up to me’ always ends with me being worse off than when I started and you with a handful of my feathers. I should cut my losses here.” She reached up to remove her mask, but Lakik’s hand on her wrist stopped her.

“Don’t tell me you’re giving up now! What would your bird man say if you had to tell him you decided his prayers were just too much trouble to answer? And here I thought you were the goddess of striving,” he admonished her, shaking his head sadly.

As the great gods argued, Rosethorn leaned across Briar to worriedly ask Tris, “What are you doing here? When Briar came back without you, I thought…”

“I think I figured out some of what’s going on here,” Tris told her. “But I have a couple other pieces that I haven’t quite put into place yet. I’m in bed with Briar at the Healer’s College in Lightsbridge, or at least my body is. The healers there seem to have no better idea of what’s going on than the ones at Winding Circle did. So, I think the solution must be here, in dreaming, somewhere.”

Rosethorn and Tris’ conversation was interrupted by the water goddess, who had somehow insinuated herself, catlike, into Briar’s lap. The table between them had disappeared. But instead of whispering promises into his ear and teasing her fingers into the waistband of his breeches, she bent nearly double to face Tris. “Do you know my name?”

“I have a clue,” Tris temporized.

Immediately, Briar was forgotten. The water goddess pulled Tris to her feet and bounced urgently, bracelets and anklets chiming vigorously. “What is it? You must tell me!”

“I know you were probably a waterfall along the river Dhara, in Gyongxe,” Tris began.

“Dhara?” The goddess frowned, then her face cleared as a slow, sweet smile smile spread across it, like water irrigating soft soil. “Mother? That was my mother!” she informed Tris triumphantly. “What else?”

“You were called the handmaiden of the mirror. Your water fell so smoothly that it could reflect the sun into the canyon where you fell.” At Dhara’s daughter’s eager look of anticipation, Tris continued, after a sideways glance at Briar. “You were known to take on the form of that which people most desired.”

The goddess thought about this. “Oh! So Briar wants an eager, half-naked sexual idol, and you want someone to respect your intelligence and make you feel wanted!” Rosethorn stuffed a laugh behind her hand while Briar and Tris both blanched. Attracted by the older woman’s laugh, the water goddess paced to stand in front of Rosethorn. “And you…?” She tilted her head curiously. “You don’t seem to want anything for yourself right now. All you want is to make sure these others are safe and happy.”

Rosethorn regarded the goddess calmly. “Is that wrong?”

The goddess shook her head, wetting Rosethorn with droplets. “No. It’s not wrong. I think it’s beautiful.” The goddess returned to Tris. “What else can you tell me?”

Tris looked at Rosethorn, wiping drops of water from above her third eye, and then at Briar, who gave her a sheepish smile. Tris couldn’t help but respond with a smile of her own, but pulled her attention away from him and focused on the goddess once more. “I’m not sure of the rest. It may have something to do with why you can’t remember any of this.”

The goddess gripped Tris’ hands fiercely. “How do I remember?”

“There’s a charm I know of that can sharpen memory,” Tris said slowly, feeling uncomfortable about raising the goddess’ hopes. “But it can also make you forget. I don’t know the charm, and even if I did know the charm, I’m not sure I’d know how to use it.”

“But who does? Who knows it?” The goddess shrieked with anticipation.

“You did. You kept it safe within you while you were a window in Professor Nepeta’s basement.”

The water goddess drew her eyebrows together in thought. “But I was protecting so many charms. How do I know which one is the right one?”

“It’s not my fault!” the goddess Asaia screeched loudly, attracting all eyes to her. “I had my tool all picked out but she keeps refusing my call!” She swept one paper-feathered wing out toward Tris. “How can I expect her to dedicate herself to me if I have to compete with you for her attention?”

Lakik shrugged, radiant with smugness. “Is it my fault I’m so fascinating?”

“No, but it is your fault you keep meddling! Why are you even here?” Asaia asked, exasperated.

“I lost a bet,” Lakik said very quietly. “I never welch on my bets.”

“Never?” Asaia sounded scornful and disbelieving.

Lakik suddenly appeared to lose interest in his argument with the bird-winged goddess. His footsteps clicked sharply as he strode across the floor to Rosethorn. “But I have been neglecting you, my dear! Can you forgive me?” He took the woman’s hand and kissed it. “May I make known to you a very excellent partner? He’s light on his feet, well matched to you for dancing.” He drew Rosethorn along and presented her formally to Briar, placing her hand in his. “The music will begin momentarily,” he assured them.


	35. Chapter 35

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lakik stood before the water goddess now. “Daughter of Dhara, may I have this dance?”

They could now distantly hear musicians, a small country band, cheerful pipes and mellow strings playing dance tunes to a beat like the tapping of a great foot.

Lakik stood before the water goddess now. “Daughter of Dhara, may I have this dance?” The small goddess giggled and bounced while nodding. Everyone got wet.

Tris stood awkwardly off to one side, feeling a bit neglected as she watched the neat patterns the dancers made in their two-couple set.

Suddenly, Asaia was beside her, feathers rustling into place as she settled. “I am not very angry with you, but I would like to know why.”

“Why, what?” Tris asked the goddess for clarification.

“Why do you keep refusing me?” the goddess asked, bright eyes emotionless and sharp as they regarded the mortal dreamer. “I would be an excellent patroness for you. Your intelligence alone is more than reason for me to take an interest in you, but your affinity for the air and your power to shape patterns in the skies seem very well matched to my interests. If you became my dedicate, I would ensure that all you needed would be yours, and I would not hinder you from pursuing the pleasures you wished.” She indicated the dancers, clasping hands, changing partners, swinging each other across the set in multiple variations of the same steps.

Tris considered the goddess’ question. “And what would you have me do for you in exchange for your protection and aid?”

“I would ask you for nothing that you could not easily do,” the goddess insisted.

“Would you ask me to kill for you?” Tris asked bluntly.

“If that seemed necessary,” Asaia told her calmly.

Tris nodded. “That’s what I thought. The more powerful the patron, the more casual they seem to be about death.”

“Death is a necessary thing,” Asaia said.

“I’m not disputing that,” Tris agreed reasonably. “But it does not need to be my necessary thing.”

Asaia sighed, relenting. “I’m not going to demand you submit to my jesses for this. But my current instrument,” she indicated the body she wore, “does not work well with Lakik’s chosen vessel. And he has skills we will need.” She removed her mask and held it out to Tris. Dita Batnose’s face was pleading. “Please take it. Just for now. I’m not up to this task.”

“But I thought you… well, Batnose and Glassmane were…” Tris frowned. “Lovers? In love? What am I trying to say? Why don’t they… you work well together?”

“Sharing a physical passion does not mean you have an emotional connection, or an intellectual one.” Batnose smiled sadly. “No one person can meet you on every thing at once. That’s by design, so that humans form communities, stretch out and make many connections in many different ways.”

Tris thought of Briar’s new chest tattoo, the plant that reached out in many directions at once. A part of her wished she was more like he was. Briar would share his heart and his bed with many people through his life, she knew. It was how the gods had made him. And Tris would share her thoughts and her words with people as freely, and with as much passion. That was as important to her as sex seemed to be to Briar. And together, they could remind each other that there was more to life than either the purely physical or the purely intellectual.

And Glassmane? Where did he fit? Tris watched Lakik’s instrument take hands with Rosethorn, grinning ridiculously and spinning her around. He returned to the water goddess and spun her in a similar manner. Tris wondered if she really would work with him better than Batnose could.

Turning to Batnose, Tris instead saw Briar, standing somewhat sheepishly in her place.

“Where did she go?” Tris asked.

“She had to leave. She seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, actually.” A copper feathered cape hung from his hands. “She said this was for you.”

Tris still held the mask in her hands. Its great bird-beak gleamed copper.

“You’ve worn them before. You looked beautiful in them,” Briar told her, somewhat sadly. He shook the copper cape. It chimed crazily. “The first time I saw you naked you were wearing these in my dream.” He grinned abruptly, to hide his melancholy. “You were very sexy. I’d never really seen you in that light before then. But now I can’t unsee it.” His smile dimmed into an expression that felt more true. “You frighten me sometimes. You’re so intelligent. I wonder how you can be attracted to a dummy like me. When we met, I was always worried that you were looking down on me because I couldn’t read. Then you taught me how and I felt like I was even more in your debt. What could you possibly see in me?”

“I've wondered the same thing. You always seem so good at talking to people and I couldn’t figure out how.” Tris admitted. “I was worried you only took me to bed out of pity for the poor fat virgin who can’t even make friends without feeling she has to solve all their problems as a way of justifying her existence in their lives.”

“Virgin? No way.” Briar laughed. “You can’t tell me that was your first time…!?”

Tris blushed. “Okay, so I won’t tell you.”

“Seriously?” Briar’s expression grew thoughtful. “That explains more than it doesn’t. Except…?

Tris tilted her head to the side, a slight blush already lighting her ears. “Well, I told you, when I first started scrying the winds I had a lot of trouble filtering out images. A lot of people, particularly in warmer climates, leave their windows open at night to catch the breezes.” She met Briar’s eyes defiantly. “It was quite educational.”

Briar thought of all the times he’d entertained friends in the house he’d shared with Daja and Tris on Cheeseman Street. How many times had he thought to close the window? It was Briar’s turn to blush.

Catching the drift of his thoughts, Tris said, “Don’t worry, Briar. You’ve never done anything that shocked me. Surprised me a time or two, yes, but I know well enough the kind of person you are. And you’re no different in bed than out of it. You’re kind, attentive and affectionate. You never leave your partners wanting.” Tris admitted shyly, “And I do love you.”

“Oh, Coppercurls, you know I love you.” Briar looked hesitant, “But my heart… my desires… it’s complicated. I can’t make you any traditional promises. I might have the best intentions in the world, but I just can’t see myself…”

“I know who you are, Briar,” Tris reassured him with quiet certainty. “I know you’ve got a much broader appetite than mine, and you’ll probably never be satisfied with just one partner in bed, but I wanted… I want… I’d like to be able to open my heart to people like you do. And I thought, maybe, you could teach me how?”

Briar laughed then. “Typical Tris! You found a new skill you wanted to learn, so when you couldn’t find a book, you went looking for a teacher!”

“What’s wrong with that?” Tris asked, her dignity a bit injured.

“Nothing,” Briar decided. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Didn’t Niko tell you the strongest relationship a mage will ever have is the one between teacher and student?” He held the cape up for her. “If you can get us all out of here safely, I’ll teach you everything you want to know. Even if it makes our relationship a bit complicated,” he promised.

Tris smiled. “I like complicated,” she reminded him.

Tris fastened the copper bird mask to her face and turned so Briar could fasten the feathered cape around her. Shaking her shoulders to settle the cape, the feathers chimed harmoniously and fell into patterns. All the pieces found a place, and Tris knew what to do.


	36. Chapter 36

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morning found Dedicate Crane drowsing on the hard stool. A rough hand shook him all the way awake.

Morning found Dedicate Crane drowsing on the hard stool. A rough hand shook him all the way awake. “What’s been going on here?” the floor matron demanded. “You’re not supposed to put two patients in one bed. It’s against policy!”

Crane scrubbed his eyes with his hands. “Two patients?”

“These two unconscious patients? It’s too difficult to check on their health if they’re in the same bed. I can’t tell where one’s magic leaves off and the other begins. We need to move them apart so we don’t accidentally treat the wrong patient by mistake.”

Tris was lying half on top of Briar as she had all night, her cheek against his naked chest, her hand over his heart. Her eyes were closed and she breathed softly. Briar’s chest rose and fell under her in equally content rhythms of sleep.

Dedicate Crane had to ask himself: did he have faith in them?

“I think I would like them to remain undisturbed just a little longer. Could I speak to the healer in charge?” Crane asked, as a delaying tactic as much as anything else.

The matron pursed her lips, shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say.”

Dedicate Crane spent the morning fencing with the hierarchy of the Lightsbridge Healer’s Collegium. When they brought in a generalist, he requested a specialist. When the specialist foundered on a gap in his or her knowledge, Crane requested a different specialist. Each healer examined the comatose pair, pronounced them perfectly healthy and expressed mild confusion over their inability to wake. But the couple in the bed remained undisturbed.

In one of the pauses between battles, Lecturer Batnose arrived. She was calm, tentatively smiling at Dedicate Crane. “Dedicate Crane. I believe I owe you an apology. I’m very sorry for having lost my temper with you and your…” she paused over how to refer to her, deciding on: “Miss Chandler yesterday.”

Tiredly, Crane refused to push the issue. “Apology accepted, Lecturer Batnose.”

“I was rattled. It was a stressful situation. I admit, I have a bit of a temper, and when I’m frightened I tend to unload it all on the people closest to me. I’m sorry. You were right there and… well, I trust you. We’ve become friends after a fashion, yes?  You really forgive me?” At Crane’s tired nod, Batnose asked, “And her? Do you think she’ll be able to forgive me too?”

Chuckling gently, Dedicate Crane said, “Trisana has been blessed with a temper of her own. She admits she provoked you yesterday, probably out of similar motives. If you can forgive her, she can certainly forgive you.”

Batnose looked around the room, which was mostly unchanged since her visit the the day before. “Has she been here all night?” Batnose asked, inclining her head toward the bed.

“Yes,” Crane answered simply.

“Oh,” Batnose pursed her lips in puzzlement. “But you’re sure they’re brother and sister? They don’t look much alike.”

“They are foster siblings.”

The lecturer stepped closer to the bed to peer at Tris and Briar. She watched them sleeping for a long moment, then turned away. “I don’t mean to start another argument here,” she offered tentatively to the dedicate, “but wrapped up together like that they do look…”

Sighing, Dedicate Crane insisted, “They’re close. They’ve been through a great deal together, they and their sisters. I worry sometimes that they are too close, that family of theirs. It’s not healthy to close oneself off entirely from making new friends and new connections, but I think sometimes they don’t know who else they can trust. They have trusted each other enough to share their lives, their magic, even their thoughts. The way they can work together is… transcendent. They are more deeply and more securely connected to each other than any other set of mages I know.”

“But they’re not…?” Batnose questioned gently.

“What is it with you people?” Dedicate Crane stood, finding himself at temper’s end. “You see a natural, comfortable expression of physical affection and instantly you think it must be sexual. Is everything sexual to you? Do you look out over a lecture hall of students and think how many of them you’d like to meddle with? Did you make seductive overtures to every teacher you studied with here at the University? Sometimes love is just a feeling of the heart or a connection of the mind! Why does it always have to be twisted into something it isn’t? Why does physical affection always seem to be interpreted as sexual?”

Batnose stepped back, yielding to the force of his temper, but her face was solemn. “It’s not that I want to make everything sexual, it’s just that life so often is sexual. If they are as close as you say, why shouldn’t they be sharing more than just their thoughts? It’s not like they’d be hurting anyone else. And it’s a wonderful thing to be able to share your body with someone you like and trust.” Dita Batnose smiled a bit sadly, looking at the pair. “I mean, there’s nothing like the excitement of that first encounter with someone you’re attracted to, but to share yourself with someone you know well and are comfortable with… that’s wonderful as well.”

Crane relented and sat again, too tired to weigh his words. “I confess, I have never understood it myself. All that groping and grinding holds no attraction for me.’

“Oh. Well.” Batnose was clearly uncomfortable with his unexpected confidence. “I just didn’t want her to… I mean, it would be more convenient if she were…” She cleared her throat. “Well, I’m going to, uh… go put in a good word with the arch-chancellor for Trisana. I know Glassmane had said he wanted her as a research assistant. I’m not sure there’s much use standing in the way of that, at least.”

“She’s an excellent assistant,” Crane endorsed. “She has a superb mind, very tidy, very organized.”

Batnose nodded at him, but when she moved to go, Crane called her back.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. “When you pulled me out of the library yesterday I accidentally removed a book I had forgotten I was carrying. Would you be willing to return it for me?”

“Absolutely,” Batnose agreed. “I’ll pass by the library on the way to Glassmane’s office.” She held out her hand for the book. Crane fumbled in his sleeve for it and passed it over. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a travel journal from some mage named Blessingbroke. Actually, you might find it interesting, too,” Dedicate Crane informed her. “There’s a picture of Nepeta’s skylight in the back.”

Suddenly eager, Dita Batnose flipped through the journal to the back. After a long, breathless moment, she flipped to the maps in the front. Her eyes scanned the spidery handwriting quickly. She stepped back. The wall caught her. “Do you have any idea…!” she sagged. “Gods!” she exhaled miserably.

Just then, a new healer came in, a frown already on his face. “I hear you’re giving us some trouble about your protégés.”

“Gods, Crane! Did you realize we’re dealing with gods?” Dita Batnose shouted in exasperation. “This ruins everything!”

Crane regarded her with a fatigued bewilderment. “I hardly see…?”

“Gods aren’t reproducible! We can’t propose any significant research knowing this! Our colleagues would laugh us out of the university!” She flailed her hands around, nearly hitting the newly arrived healer. That venerable gentleman ducked out of the path of the flying book she held and retreated, drawing the curtain firmly closed behind himself.

“I’m sorry,” Crane apologized, “But I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Batnose sighed. “Glassmane, Nepeta and I were going to start a research project. I was pretty sure I could get funding. But not if we’re dealing with gods. I thought it was just a really advanced piece of magic, you know, the kinds that groups of mages would work in concert. We were even going to ask if you wanted to help with the research, you knowing more about the religious aspects of these things and all.”

“If you knew it was a religious artifact, why are you so surprised that there are gods involved?” Dedicate Crane asked.

“Well, I mean, gods are interesting as far as mythology go, but actual, literal gods influencing the work? That makes it totally unpredictable! The results would never be reliable!” she wailed, clutching the book to her chest.

“I’m sorry,” Crane told her. “Would you mind lowering your voice? This is a place of healing.”

Dita Batnose sniffed bracingly. “No. You’re right. I need to get a hold of myself. I need to talk to Glassmane. I need to tell Nepeta. We’ll just have to find some other…” She sniffed again, looking very close to tears. “Thank you for your help, Dedicate Crane.”

When she left, the curtain rattling closed behind her, Crane slumped on his stool. He was exhausted. He just had the feeling that it was important to keep his vigil over the sleepers.

The curtain rattled again. A very junior looking healer, still young enough that he had not yet grown into his ears, cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” the junior healer said with the great confidence that comes from relaying someone else’s words, “but it has been determined that we can’t really help you here.”

“Why not?” Dedicate Crane asked, pulling himself up to his full height and social consequence. “Can I speak to your superior?”

“It’s not that we… they… don’t want to,” the young man clarified quickly, taking a half step back, “but we really don’t have the skill set to deal with gods, even minor ones. We’re strictly an academic institution. From what we’ve heard, the senior healer believes your friend’s problem to be entirely a religious one.” Taking in Dedicate Crane’s frown, the young man gulped nervously. “But um, depending on the god and/or goddess in question, I would suggest you might find that one of the Living Circle temples may be able to help you with this… er… problem. I hear Winding Circle in Emelan is actually fairly good, for a religious institution. You might try asking the healers there…?”

Crane chased the young man out of the room with a roar and closed the curtain firmly against any further intruders.


	37. Chapter 37

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asaia’s mask fit comfortably, changing Tris’ eyesight in some way that added dimension to everything she looked at. She turned to look at the four others who had gathered around her.

Asaia’s mask fit comfortably, changing Tris’ eyesight in some way that added dimension to everything she looked at. She turned to look at the four others who had gathered around her.

Rosethorn blinked at her with all three eyes. That was tricky a problem, Tris/Asaia knew. She would save that for last, because she would need Lakik’s help, and did not know what she would have left to bribe him with.

The water goddess, a look of hopeful innocence on her face, tugged at Tris’ heart, but Asaia saw her only as a tool to be used. The daughter of Dhara, the hand maiden of a cracked shard of mirror, this small reflector of deep desires had so much potential. But she was only a cutting from a larger specimen. Only time would tell if she could take root in new soil.

She saw Briar. She saw his fear that he would disappoint her. But at the moment, she was afraid of disappointing him as well. Whatever problems their relationship brought them, they would work on them together. It was the way they had solved everything else so far.

At last, Tris turned her attention to Lakik. She wondered how much of Glassmane was conscious behind those preposterous teeth of the trickster god. Aware of her attention, Lakik posed, making comical faces at her.

Behind Lakik, the curtain shimmered transparently.

Without knowing how she knew, Tris knew the curtain wasn’t intended to keep Briar and Rosethorn from their lives. It had been intended truly as a blessing from the great gods to protect them from the interference all the other little gods desperate for more influence in the mortal world. How Rosethorn had been trapped on the wrong side of it, and how Briar had followed her there, Tris could only guess. But she was fairly certain she could restore things to how they should be.

“Attagirl!” Lakik murmured as he strolled past. “I knew you could do it.”

“Oh, no! You don’t get to just walk out now.” Asaia/Tris said, snagging his arm. “I’m putting you to work.”

“Work?!” Lakik clutched at his chest, shocked and offended, and then narrowed his eyes shrewdly, “What’s in it for me?”

Tris/Asaia fixed her glittering eyes on the trickster. “How about for starters I refrain from tearing those decay-ridden teeth out of your mouth?”

Lakik winked. “You are fixated on my mouth, aren’t you?”

Tris blushed under the mask, but didn’t let go. “Come here.” She dragged him over to the water goddess. “Daughter of Dhara, you hold within you a charm that has the power to sharpen or dull memory. Release it to us,” Asaia demanded. “Please,” Tris added.

The little goddess blinked at them. “But I have so many charms inside me! Which one is it?”

Tris/Asaia gestured to Glassmane/Lakik. “He knows what it looks like.”

“I do?” Lakik's voice cracked comically to match his overblown expression of doubt. “Oh, of course I do,” he corrected smoothly. Lakik took the little goddess’ hand and kissed her fingertips. She giggled. Giving her a daring look, Lakik began tugging at her bracelets. She let him pull all the bangles off one arm before offering him the other. A pile of delicate iron circles littered the floor between them. Lakik knelt.

Tris wanted to look away, feeling like she was about to witness something profoundly intimate. But the water goddess only smiled coyly as she stood on one foot and let the trickster god remove the jewelry from her ankle. His hands were deft: the hands of a card player, the hands of a thief. When he had removed all her jewelry, Lakik thanked the little goddess, bending low to press a kiss on the top of the delicate little foot he held.

“Now, watch closely,” he advised the water goddess. He stacked her bangles, one on top of the other on the palm of his hand, balancing them with a comical show of effort. Then, placing the palm of his other hand on the top of the stack, he compressed them, bringing his hands together. When he lifted his top hand again, he was holding a deck of cards. He shuffled the cards, riffling them noisily, cutting them, passing them hand to hand and riffling them again. He concealed the deck a second time. When he drew his hands apart, the memory charm, gleaming golden with divine power, hung suspended between them.

With Asaia’s vision, Tris comprehended the shape of the charm perfectly. She understood how much power would be required and in which direction to achieve the effect she wanted.

“And now, my lovely bird-winged assistant will give us a little blow,” he winked at the water goddess, who blushed prettily, “and we’ll see what else we can remember.”

Tris/Asaia opened her beak and breathed gently on the charm. The golden construct twirled lazily. The great curtain parted, drawn away.

Briar stared, gaping at the open cavern around them. “I remember it all now!”

“The curtain was keeping us from remembering,” Rosethorn marveled. She turned to Lakik. “Was that curtain the blessing of Gyongxe?”

“It still is,” Lakik informed her. “But you’re still on the wrong side of it.”

Asaia/Tris gathered Briar and Rosethorn and ushered them to the correct side of the barrier.

“How did we get on the wrong side?” Rosethorn asked curiously, trying to turn around against Asaia’s grip.

“Ah, that was your fault, I’m afraid, my very sharp little thorn!” Lakik opened a third eye on his forehead to wink at her. “Your gaze is so sharp, you ripped a nice clean hole here in the curtain, stumbled through, and got yourself trapped when you couldn’t find where you’d entered.”

“Do we need to fix it?” Rosethorn asked.

“Oh, no! Asaia/Tris insisted. “The spiders will do that. They’re very good at it. If we had Sandry or Lark here, we might stick around so they could watch, but I’d rather not be in their way, so let’s finish what we need to do and get going.”

In the gap between the two panels of curtain, the very forlorn water goddess stood. “What about me?” Her smile had faded. “That charm was the one you designed, wasn’t it, Lakik? The one you gave me to trap that mage, the angry one.”

Lakik shrugged. “We had to bait the trap somehow. But I underestimated our mark and his need to take trophies of his kills. At least we kept Blessingbroke out of Gyongxe after that. He was so focused on retaining his memories of gods and wonders that he didn’t notice that I’d stolen his sense of direction while he was lost in his thoughts. He never found his way back to Gyongxe as long as he lived. But the damage had been done to you you, my dear. For that I am sorry.”

The goddess started crying now, not the sweet big droplets designed to attract Briar’s attention or the bitter little droplets she shared with Tris for sympathy, but snot laden ugly crying, hopeless and lost. “My people. My poor people. Oh, they were destroyed because I was foolish enough to believe a trickster wouldn't betray me. I trusted you!” She reached out and slapped the charm out of Lakik’s grip. It fell to the ground and rolled a few feet, stopping against Tris/Asaia’s ankles. “They cut me into pieces. They destroyed me. They took this as a prize.” She gestured to her small body, now looking less like Lisse Sherrit and more like a watery ghost of approximately Lisse’ size. “Oh, it is too much! I don’t want to remember! Dhara does not exist anymore. If I am not with Dhara, who am I? Let me forget! Let me forget!” She puddled to her knees, crying.

It was Tris who picked up Lakik’s memory charm. Holding it between her hands she asked, “Help me, Briar?”

But it was Lakik who stepped in. “Nonsense. I started this. I’ll finish it.” He waved Briar and Rosethorn off. “Go wait over there by the exit.” When the green mages had retreated to the far edge of the cavern, Lakik braced his hands on the outside of Tris/Asaia’s and blew a strong steady breath to set the charm spinning.

“Oh!” the goddess-who-had-been-Dhara melted in her tears, dripping to the ground and spreading out in a wide puddle. The puddle solidified, looking very much like the skylight had, but in a large perfect circle. Lakik went over to the frozen goddess and knelt to pick her off the ground.

“She’s so very beautiful, isn’t she? You think you understand her. You think you can see right through her. But she fools the eye, containing hidden depths that draw you into her endless spirals, turning you around until the only thing you see clearly is... yourself.” Lakik stared, apparently fascinated by the giant lens of water. He rubbed at the edge of the circle. “Now all that remains is the problem with my sharpest thorn. She still sees too much. She pierces even the densest veil.”

“I was going to just peck out her eye. It wouldn’t hurt her much once the veil sweeps closed again,” Asaia said. “No!” Tris insisted, throwing her entire will against the bird-winged goddess. “There must be another way!”

Lakik held a much smaller circle now. As he rubbed, it got smaller and smaller, denser and denser.

“It will be quick. She doesn’t need that third eye. You don’t have one. Briar doesn’t have one. Why should she?” Asaia argued reasonably. “Think of it as one of those necessary amputations. It is not a comfortable procedure, but it may save the life.”

Lakik said nothing, polishing a tiny dark lens between one thumb and forefinger.

“NO!” Tris denied. She dropped the memory charm at her feet. Yanking the long beaked mask from her head, she threw it as far from her as she could manage. She fumbled with the catch on the copper feathered cape, finally unfastening it and flinging it into the gap where the curtain was still parted. “I won’t do it.”

“Smart choice,” Lakik told her. “The simple answer isn’t always the most effective one.”

Something in his tone caught Tris’ attention. “Do you have a more… complicated solution to offer?”

Lakik held a delicate lens between thumb and forefinger. “Spectacles. Or… a monocle, really. I thought to myself: she was a water goddess. It would be kinder to keep her in a wet environment. Eyes are wet. Who has an extra eye that it would be really much more convenient if it were blinded, or as good as blind?”

“Can you do it without hurting Rosethorn?” Tris demanded.

“I can pick a lock before you know you’ve lost the key,” Lakik bragged.

Tris frowned. “What does that even mean?”

Lakik sighed. “It means yes, you pedantic child. Have you no poetry in your soul?”

“What about the charm?” Tris knelt to examine it. It had fallen on its side. She was afraid to touch it again for fear of losing… or gaining too many memories. “It seems dangerous to just leave it lying around like that.”

Lakik leaned over to pinch one of the curls near the top of the shape. He twisted it. The whole charm collapsed in on itself in a satisfying cascade of rolls, the final curl diving into its own center and disappearing without even a blip of backlash. Lakik winked at Tris. “Much more satisfying than triangles. Come on,” he invited with a nod toward Rosethorn and Briar. “I think you’ve all slept long enough.”

“Do we need to close the curtain before we go?” Briar asked when the group was reunited.

Lakik shrugged. “It’ll get taken care of. It’s easier to do from the other side anyway.” He approached Rosethorn. “And now my sweet sharpness, I must bid you a fond farewell.”

“Well, trickster, it’s been educational,” Rosethorn informed him. “I want to thank you for the, er… nice time.”

Lakik waggled his eyebrows at her.

“I beg your pardon?” Rosethorn tried to freeze him with her indifference.

“Aw, come on,” he wheedled. “Don’t I get a goodnight kiss from my date? Just a peck on the cheek for sentiment’s sake?” Lakik pointed to his own smooth cheek in invitation. “Just a little smoocharoo?”

“It’s a trick. I know it’s a trick. And I’ll be switched if I can refuse an offer like that,” Rosethorn found herself saying. She leaned in, intending to plant a quick kiss where the god indicated, but Lakik had his arms around her and dipped her into a deep, passionate embrace before she could protest.

Tris saw his free hand caress her forehead, insert the dark lens in Rosethorn’s third eye, and gently slide that extra eyelid closed over it. He set her on her feet again and stepped back quickly.

Rosethorn forgot to be upset. She blinked a couple times. “What did you do? I’m not seeing double anymore.” She looked at Lakik, hiding warily behind Briar. “That’s much better. Whatever you did, thank you.”

Lakik smiled in a great show of comic bashfulness. “Aw, shucks. T’weren’t nothing.”

“But if you do anything like that again without my permission I will hang you by the heels in my well,” Rosethorn promised with an evil grin.

Lakik backed away, his hands up in defense.

“Now, old man, how do we get back? All I see is flat rock,” Briar insisted.

“Simplicity itself,” Lakik insisted. “Just follow the bone snakes. They’ll lead you back to where you belong.”

Indeed, at their feet were snakes of jointed bone and little else, sinuously twining around ankles in anticipation of a walk.

“Well, then. Goodbye,” Rosethorn bid Lakik from a safe distance and started walking purposefully, a snake leading her into a passage through the rock that hadn’t been there a moment before and suddenly wasn’t there once she’d passed through.

“Here goes nothing,” Briar said. He reached out to touch Tris’ hand. “I’ll see you on the other side.” He, too, disappeared through a door that hadn’t been there.

“My turn,” Tris announced. Lakik took hold of her wrist tightly.

“Wait,” the god demanded. “I have one last trick. I want you to watch.”

With his free hand, Lakik reached into his mouth and pulled out a handful of dice. He shook them. He tossed them in the direction Tris had tossed Asaia’s mask and cape. They rattled across the floor of the cavern like hail on flagstones. Glassmane held Tris’s hand now.

“I’m sorry. I treated you very badly. Lakik… isn’t kind. But he told me something I wanted to share with you.”

“What?” Tris asked.

They were in the basement again. Glassmane leaned back against the edge of work table still covered in fragments of clay. He pulled Tris to rest against his legs, cradling her face in clean hands. His eyes were intent upon hers. “He says that not everything that feels like a mistake is, and that the biggest mistakes are made by fools who are absolutely convinced they know what they’re doing.” Glassmane bumped her forehead with his own. “I have no idea what I’m doing with you, so maybe that’s a good thing?”

Tris opened her mouth to say something, but found Glassmane in the way.

Kissing Glassmane was nothing like kissing Briar, not even in a dream. Kissing Briar felt right. It felt comfortable and warm and pleasant and good. Kissing Glassmane was like standing in a storm, inviting the lightning bolts to hit.

When they parted, Tris felt curiously wobbly. “Oh.” She looked around and found her snake on the ground. “There it is. I, uh… I think I need to go now.”

“Yes,” Glassmane agreed regretfully. “Me, too.”

But they stood for a long moment staring at each other before either of them moved.

“You go first,” Glassmane insisted.

“No, why don’t you?” Tris realized she was being stupid. “Never mind. I’ll go first.”

“Bye,” Glassmane said quietly behind her as she followed the snake through the door home.


	38. Chapter 38

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Rosethorn woke, it was mid-afternoon.

When Rosethorn woke, it was mid-afternoon. She stretched her arms above her head lazily. She felt a bit weak and shaky, like she’d been doing too much magic, but she was definitely well rested. Sandry, intent on a piece of needlework, looked up, startled, at Rosethorn’s contented yawn.

“Rosethorn? You’re awake! Rosethorn!” Sandry dropped her sewing to the little table next to her and ran to the door. “LARK! ROSETHORN’S AWAKE!!!”

Lark came rushing in, tears in her eyes, wiping her hands on a towel. She slid to her knees next to Rosethorn’s bed and clasped the other woman’s hands in her own. “Rosie? You’re awake! How do you feel? Do you remember me?”

“Relax, Lark. It’s all worked out. Although, I am starving!” Rosethorn admitted in Sandry’s direction.

“I’ll go ladle out some of the broth,” Sandry insisted, leaving the women alone together.

“I was so worried about you, Rosie,” Lark admitted, patting the other woman’s arms and shoulders as if to reassure herself she was still there.

“Come here, you,” Rosethorn invited, pulling Lark onto the bed with her and enveloping her in a great hug. “I’ve missed you so much,” she mumbled into the other woman’s hair.

“I’ve missed you too,” Lark echoed. “You were gone too long. Don’t do that again.”

“I won’t. I’ll try not, anyway.”

—

When Briar woke, the first thing he had to contend with was the soft blue-grey mass of Tris’ veil wedged under his chin. Her body was limp across his own in a hard, narrow bed, and he didn’t want to disturb her if she was still sleeping. The last time he’d seen her awake, she’d just rescued him from the roof. His memory was much clearer now, though he did have a few messy patches where his dreams must have intruded into his waking life. He remembered the water goddess, the roof and his vision of Asaia before Tris showed up. He still only had flashes of images where he knew sleeping dreams must have been: Tris, naked, as Asaia’s cape fluttered in the storm, Rosethorn knitting, petting the bone snakes as if they were cats, the water goddess, wearing nothing but iron bangles and his soaking wet shirt, bouncing at him in a great steaming tub, Lakik’s teeth showing as he grinned and winked, Tris and Glassmane wrapped in each others arms, kissing with heated abandon. Briar felt himself stirring, not sure if he was glad or embarrassed that Tris’ leg was draped over his crotch.

He turned to see Dedicate Crane, eyes closed, slumping half off the uncomfortable wooden stool that was the only seat provided the small room.

“Hey, Crane?” Briar called hoarsely. He cleared his throat. “What time is it?” he asked.

Crane woke all the way up with a start. “Hmm?” He rubbed his hands over his face. “Just noon, I think.” Squinting at the window, he corrected himself. “Mid-afternoon. You’ve been asleep since yesterday at about this time.”

Briar reached up to scratch his scalp with his free hand. Tris still slept. Awkwardly, gently, he patted her shoulder. “Hey, Coppercurls? Time to rise and shine!”

—

When Tris woke, she felt warm and content. She rubbed her face kittenishly against Briar’s tattooed chest before realizing she had Dedicate Crane’s eyes on her. “How long?” she asked.

“You slept the night through and much of the next day. It’s mid-afternoon. The healers want us out of this room so they can care for patients who are, in their words, actually sick and not just tired.” Crane looked at Tris curiously, as if he were trying to remember something but couldn’t quite.

“Fine. I suppose we should get up.” Tris unwound herself from Briar, finding her neck and shoulders incredibly stiff from lying in one position for so long. Sitting on the bed, she stretched, tilting her head slowly from one side to the other. Dedicate Crane handed Briar the neatly folded stack of his clothing.

“Where’s my shirt? And my small clothes?” Briar asked, pawing through the pile.

Tris yawned, getting to her feet and stretching her arms out. “They were all you were wearing when I rescued you yesterday. They should be in the bucket. I’m afraid they’re probably still a bit wet.” Tris fished his dry underwear from the otherwise empty bucket. “Or not.”

Dedicate Crane peered at the wrinkled linen. “Do you still think they’re holy?” he asked.

“As long as they’re not holey, hand them over,” Briar insisted. “I think Crane needs a proper bed, and you need to talk to the arch-chancellor, Tris. Otherwise, if I know people, this whole mess is going to get blown out of proportion.”

“I also need to talk to the Sisterhood and tell them why I’m leaving. And make sure Lisse is all right. But that can wait. You’re right. The arch-chancellor first.” Tris turned her back to Briar as he started to dress, to spare Dedicate Crane’s notions of propriety more than anything.

“You’re leaving Lightsbridge?” Dedicate Crane asked, befuddled. “There’s no reason for you to do that. Lecturer Batnose came this morning to apologize. She said she was going to put a good word in for you.”

Tris left the empty bucket in the corner of the room. “I want to return to Winding Circle with you, to make sure Rosethorn really has woken. I want to make sure there are no ill effects from… whatever it was we did. I’m still not sure what actually happened.”

Dedicate Crane asked, “Don’t you remember the dream?”

“I remember the dream,” Tris said. Briar nodded agreement. “But I’m still not sure what it means in the real world.”

“Tris…” Briar was mostly dressed when he put his hand on her shoulder. “Leaving Lightsbridge now doesn’t mean you leave it forever. I’m sure if you wanted an opportunity to come back, you can work something out with the arch-chancellor. He really respects Niko’s judgment of you.”

Tris looked at Briar, confused. “How do you know so much about what the arch-chancellor thinks?”

Dedicate Crane chuckled. “Whose house do you think we’re staying in, anyway?”

—

When Akatin Glassmane woke it was past midday. His mouth tasted foul, as if he’d been chewing on dirty old coins. He was surprised Dita hadn’t come banging on his door by now. He remembered now they’d had a date last night, and he’d stood her up. But Glassmane had been so ashamed of how he treated the little weather witch, he’d gone for a long walk out by the botanical gardens rather than face anybody.

A rime of dark clay under his fingernails reminded him it had been too long since he’d visited the baths. He needed a good long hot soak and maybe a jump in the cold pool would shock him back to his senses and dispel the vague feeling he was forgetting something. Idle fragments of dream still littered the back of his thoughts. There was something about grinding spectacle lenses for the gods… or maybe it was grinding spectacle lenses out of gods? Glassmane wasn’t sure why gods would need spectacles, anyway. Couldn’t they just see whatever they wanted to see anyway?

Yawning, Akatin Glassmane rubbed his eyes with the back of his arm. But first, he needed tea.


	39. Chapter 39

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Early the following spring, Briar was out in the garden of the Cheeseman Street house.

Early the following spring, Briar was out in the garden of the Cheeseman Street house, ostensibly to check on the cold frames, but mostly as an excuse to stay out of Daja’s way. He’d heard the muffled explosion in her forge, and the resultant cursing, and once he’d checked that she was physically unhurt, left her to stamp around the house in peace so she could groom her dignity back into place. The maid was out doing the marketing. Tris had gone to Winding Circle for the day, to visit with Rosethorn and Lark and spend some time with Glaki, but she was due back for dinner. Sandry had a rare free evening on her schedule so was planning to join them. It would be nice to have the four of them together for a meal again.

Briar dusted off his gloves and went to check the flowerbeds in front of the house. They’d had rain a few days before, so Briar was certain he’d need to give a talking to some weeds about how this was not a friendly patch of soil for them to settle into. Coming around the side of the house, Briar saw a man standing in the street, squinting at a piece of paper through spectacles that kept sliding heavily down his nose. He wore a large bag slung across his shoulder. The man walked halfway down the lane, turned, and slowly walked back, peering intently at houses over the tops of his spectacles, then peering again at his scrap of paper. Briar watched him, idly pulling weeds and tossing them onto the path where he could collect them for the compost pile when he was done. Finally, the wandering man noticed Briar, busy with his weed pulling.

“My good fellow, perhaps you can help me? Is this Cheeseman Street?” he asked.

Hoping to have some fun with him, Briar put on his best local boy accent. “Why, no sir! You’ve got to go about four, five, maybe six blocks thataway,” he pointed in a wild direction too quickly for the man to follow, “and turn left where there used to be that wine shop.”

“Oh.” The man frowned at his paper. “I could have sworn…!” He turned and began trudging up the street the way he had come.

“Glassmane!” Briar called, stripping off his gloves and tossing them next to the weed pile.

Akatin Glassmane stopped and turned slowly. “You…!”

“I can’t believe you didn’t recognize me!” Briar complained. “After all we’ve been to each other!”

Glassmane laughed heartily. “Briar Moss, it is good to see you!” The men met in a back pounding embrace, after which, Glassmane removed his spectacles and tucked them into his shirt. “I blame these spectacles. I didn’t recognize you at first! But now that I’ve found the place, I don’t need them!” He waved the piece of paper, which proved to be a map of the neighborhood before shoving it under the flap of his satchel.

“What are you doing here?” Briar asked.

“Oh, I came to Summersea on some business, while Lightsbridge is on break.” He avoided Briar’s eyes. “And, how is your… sister?” he asked too casually.

“I’ve got three of ‘em!” Briar reminded the other mage. “Only Daja is home right now, but come in and I’ll introduce you. Can you stay for dinner? Tris and Sandry will both be there for it. You can meet the family all at once!”

Over tea, Glassmane told Briar and Daja that he had been commissioned by the Duke of Emelan to craft some spectacles. He confessed a little confusion over how the Duke even knew of his hobby to write to him about it, but he wasn’t about to refuse the request of a potentially powerful patron.

“Where are you staying?” Daja, whose temper rarely stayed hot for long, was enjoying the distraction their guest provided. “We can put you up here. We’ve got plenty of room at the moment, now that Tris' students aren't staying here.”

With a somewhat awkward glance at Briar, Glassmane demurred, insisting he had a very nice room in an inn not far away where he’d already paid for the week, but he’d gratefully accept the dinner invitation. “I really came to talk to Ana… Trisana.”

“I know she got a letter from you, not far back,” Briar mentioned.

“Yes,” Glassmane said softly. “She answered it. That’s partly why I’m here.” After a pause he asked, “How is she?”

Daja and Briar didn’t need to share a look to know what the other was thinking, but they did anyway.

“She’ll be home any minute,” Daja reassured him. “More tea?”


	40. Chapter 40

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tris had been warned by both Briar and Daja that she had a visitor waiting at home.

Tris had been warned by both Briar and Daja that she had a visitor waiting at home. She wouldn’t say she rushed back, but she didn’t dawdle. In fact, she was slightly breathless when she arrived in Cheeseman Street. She patted the loose veil she wore over her hair to make sure it was secured well. With Daja’s pins in it, it always was. She shook out her skirts.  Sandry's workmanship meant that was all she needed to do to neaten up.  At last, Tris took a deep breath and entered the house. She heard laughter from the front parlor. Setting her basket on the table in the hall, Tris aimed for the noise of people, a most un-Tris-like action.

“Glassmane!” Tris called, seeing the other mage sitting over tea and cake crumbs with Briar and Daja.

Akatin Glassmane stood, looking a bit stunned. “You really took your street name as your fake name to study? What kind of idiot does that? You’d be found out in a minute!”

Tris laughed. “My fake name isn’t what tripped me up and you know it! Sit down, Akatin, and tell me what you thought of the outline? Am I missing anything?”

Briar stood. “And now they’re going to talk business for the next half hour! If you don’t mind,” Briar said to Tris and Akatin, “I’m going to help Daja clear these tea things away and get ready for dinner.”

At Tris’ confused look, Daja reminded her, “Sandry’s coming tonight. And your friend has agreed to join us,” she smiled meaningfully at Glassmane. She helped Briar clear the room, but they left the door open.

After they’d dealt with the dirty dishes, Daja leaned against the door frame in the kitchen, watching Briar pinch back the herbs growing in the window. “I thought you and Tris were keeping company these days.”

“We are,” Briar acknowledged contentedly. “When we can find time for it anyway. She’s been working through the night more frequently as she gets to the trickier sections of this book she’s writing. Glassmane isn’t going to change much between us. She’s mostly interested in him for his mind, anyway. She asked him for feedback on the book.”

“You know, I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to ask her about it. What is this book she’s writing?” Daja asked.

“Oh! It sounds like it could be interesting,” Briar told her. “She’s working on a textbook for academic mages that explains more about ambient magic and how it works, its strengths and weaknesses. She found that there is a lot of misinformation about ambient gifts taught at Lightsbridge, and she thinks that’s part of the reason she got such a poor reception from so many of Niko’s mage friends.”

“You think that’s all they’re talking about?” she inquired. The conversation drifting down the hall from the parlor had suddenly stopped.

After a moment of careful listening, a slow grin spread across Briar’s face. “Okay, so maybe it’s not just his mind she’s attracted to. You have to admit, he’s awfully charming.”

“Won’t this make things more complicated?” Daja asked worriedly.

Briar grinned. “You know Tris as well as I do. She likes complicated.”

Daja snorted. “True enough.” She was still watching Briar. “But you? You don’t enjoy making things difficult if they don’t have to be. What are you thinking?”

Briar leaned a hip against the countertop and ran his hands through his hair, fussing a few strands back into place. He raised his eyebrows impishly. “I’m thinking I’d like to find out if Glassmane has any interest in men as well.”

Daja laughed out loud. “You would!”


	41. Author's Notes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank You!

I want to thank everyone who has read this far, everyone who has left kudos and/or comments, and I want to apologize to that one person who deleted her kudos and bookmark when I finally nailed my colors to the mast of the good ship Tris/Briar. I didn’t think I was being particularly subtle about where this was going, but I’m sorry if it was upsetting.

As a lifelong member of “Team Both (and all points in between)”, I wrote this for Briar as much as for Tris. I know that Tamora Pierce has placed into the record (over on Tumblr) that she intends for Tris to be read as straight, Briar as “willing to experiment” (and has been shown in the books a fumbling his way through the ethics of non-monogamy) and they are no, never, not ever going to be a romantic couple, “just good brother and sister.” I have no problem with this. I can see any number of reasons Tris and Briar would be uninterested in adding a more romantic or sexual element to their friendship, and I'm sure Ms. Pierce will show us her characters choices in an entertaining fashion.

But I am worried by how Briar’s in canon hyper-sexuality (which seems not the least bit evident in Battle Magic, but remains nonetheless an interesting character development in The Will of the Empress) and the author’s insistence that he’s probably bisexual, or at least extremely open to experimentation, seem intended as reasons against Briar and Tris developing a meaningful affair. She hasn’t written anything I’m uncomfortable with yet, but she’s placed Chekhov’s gun on the mantlepiece and I’m afraid she’s going to fire it before the third act is over. So, I will say this loudly for the people in the back: Bisexuality (or omni-sexuality or pan-sexuality or whatever you feel describes it best) and non-monogamy do not make people unable to fall in love, they do not prevent people from loving deeply and dearly even temporary sexual partners, and it does not mean they are automatically uninterested in people who are straight and/or more traditionally inclined to monogamy.

Even with her more strait-laced merchant upbringing, I can absolutely see Tris turning to Briar as the one man who would never want to hurt her emotionally, and therefore, the safest person with whom to explore her sexuality if she’s worried about rejection from someone she really likes. I think intellectually she’d also appreciate Briar as someone who had done the research she hadn’t gotten around to yet and could share the fruits of his knowledge and experience with her. But at the same time, it seems pretty clear that if Tris’ intellectual curiosity and Briar’s interest in novel experiences are the only things that gets them into bed together, it’s going to be fun while it lasts and then they’ll return to being good friends when Tris satisfies her curiosity and Briar finds someone else to play with. But whether they do or do not, I am confident that, sex or no sex, they’re always going to be good close friends.

So, though I know that in canon Tris/Briar is never going to be a thing, I am hoping that Ms. Pierce doesn’t pull the awful old “they can’t be together because he’s a player and she’s a good girl” or “she could never satisfy Briar’s kinky neeeeeeeeds” or any of that cliche claptrap that gets trotted out when bisexuality and non-monogamous lifestyles are the topic on a very special episode of any after school special. And as the promised Tris in Lightsbridge novel is her last book of the cycle on contract to Scholastic, I hope Ms. Pierce gives Tris a nice happy ending. (And I mean that in the massage parlor sense.) But at the same time, I hope she can do it without going out of her way to tear Briar down by turning him into an undateable caricature of bisexuality.

Thank you, and I hope you enjoyed reading!  - Tomato Nadeshiko


End file.
